All Hallowed
by ObsidianJade
Summary: (Sequel to 'The Truth in Old Saws', being crossposted from AO3) Since July, the new, and exceptionally weird, 'normal' for Blade has included having his partner's ghost by his side. Now October's rolled around, and life is about to get even weirder. Blade/Nick. Part Three of the Hallowed 'verse.
1. Pumpkin Spice Impossibilities

Notes: When I started this, it was intended to be a short, 5-10k-ish piece, although I stalled what I thought was three-quarters of the way through. After a short period of it going precisely nowhere, Nick suggested I make it a sequel to The Truth In Old Saws, and then... well, it turned out to be over 40k total, has spawned several small offshoot pieces, AND has taken over my ongoing Epic Cars Fanfiction (Explicitly Not 'OF DOOM').

...if you read my stuff in other categories, you will know that things like that does tend to just _happen_ to my work, particularly when I have a particularly persistent Muse in the category. And to be honest, I've never had one quite as persistent as Nick.

This story is complete over on AO3, but being crossposted here for broader exposure and nostalgia. (Yes, I am one of the old days Cars authors. I did those two where Lightning gets killed and Doc angsts a lot, among others.)

WARNINGS for the story as a whole include characters with PTSD from various sources, lewd humor from Nick-sources, references to canonical character deaths (Nick's, and the P-3 Orion on The Wall) mild profanity, passing references to suicidal intentions ( _Saving Tomorrow_ is part of this 'verse), and brief discussions of societal homophobia. Anything I've forgotten will be warned for by chapter. And if you need to be _warned_ that this is a slash fic, you may want to avoid my work.

Massive amounts of credit and appreciation go to the beyond-amazing AmbulanceRobots and her incredible stories. When you think you've spotted a reference to War Stories in here, I can almost guarantee you're right. There are so many I've lost count, since I consider her stuff to be essentially canon, and she is very kind about letting me clog up her comments sections over on AO3.

Disclaimer: The Cars/Planes Universe and all characters and settings contained are owned by Disney/Pixar. I make no claims to ownership and no profit from this work.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER ONE:**  
Pumpkin Spice Impossibilities

Nudging the door of his hanger carefully closed behind him, Blade let out a sigh that he'd been restraining for what felt like hours.

It was October thirtieth, months into a horrific fire season, and he was exhausted. The entire team had been run ragged over the past month; tonight was the first time in three and a half weeks that his entire team, Smokejumpers included, was on base for a second night in a row.

Out of sheer habit, Blade shot a glance towards the far side of his hanger, huffing faintly in amusement when he found the space empty. It wouldn't stay that way for long, he knew; he hadn't spent a night alone since July.

July had been a very, very eventful month. A racing superstar sprung on them for training, the park's largest fire in half a century, Blade's own crash, Dusty's crash, Cad's removal, Windlifter very patiently guiding Blade through realizing his partner's ghost had been with him all along, until Blade was able to see Nick for himself...

He owed Windlifter more than he could ever repay. Having Nick back... it was more than he ever could have hoped for.

It wasn't the same, of course, it couldn't be. Nick's being incorporeal put a kibosh on any of the more physical aspects of their relationship - aspects that had, back in the day, been _very_ satisfying once the hanger doors shut at nights. Or occasionally when they found a private enough rooftop on brilliant afternoons...

Clearing his throat, Blade bit back a smile, even though there was nobody here to see him. Nick had always been the more adventurous of them, and Blade had often wondered at the time if his partner would actually have objected to them being caught.

He was honest enough with himself to admit that he did miss the physical side of their relationship. There hadn't been anyone else, since Nick's death - the emotional and the physical were too entwined for him. Having the emotionally intimate half of their relationship back, but not the physical, was... well, more than he ever could have hoped for, certainly, but had put him in a rather awkward state once or twice.

Resolving said awkward state, with Nick smirking and urging him on, had been... well, there hadn't been a lot of _that_ in the last thirty years, either, and he hadn't actually remembered it being that good.

Maybe he wouldn't actually have minded if someone had happened on him and Nick one of those brilliant afternoons, either.

It was incredible, now, being able to think about Nick so freely. Until he'd seen his friend, transparent but unquestionably _there_ , still with him, he'd spent so much energy ruthlessly suppressing any thought or memory of Nick, CHoPs, even Hollywood in general. He hadn't realized until he stopped how exhausting not-thinking had been.

Which was a relief. He'd certainly needed the extra mental energy, as well as Nick's support, to cope with the last couple of months.

Other than the exhausting frequency of the fires, the last few months hadn't been _bad_ , per se, just... intense. And weird. Cad Spinner was gone, thank Ford, and Jammer was an intelligent and extremely competent park ranger who unquestionably had Piston Peak's best interests at his core.

Those best interests, though, meant a slew of meetings that Jammer wanted Blade's presence in, which was a novel concept after Cad had spent the better part of a decade pretending the team was invisible, unless he needed to yell at them. Most of the meetings now were about budget rearrangements - unquestionably the Air Attack team needed more than the twenty percent of their budget they'd been subsisting on for years now, but now the damn bridge needed to be rebuilt, Jammer wanted the Base to have its own direct water supply, and maybe a second access road into and out of the Park should be explored?

After the fifth meeting, Blade had given up trying to glare-and-logic the Board into submission and sent Windlifter. Two hours later, the Air Attack team's budget had been restored to sixty-five percent, a plan had been laid to restructure the park's water lines, and the rebuild of the bridge was set to begin.

After all, while the Air Attack team was perfectly aware the massive Sikorsky wouldn't hurt a Bug, the park's Board - composed mostly of cars, and not large ones at that - didn't have that knowledge.

The annoyances of bureaucracy and the fires had been the intense part. The weird part was slightly less obvious, although Windlifter factored fairly significantly in that, too; after all, Windlifter was the one who taught Blade to see ghosts.

And now he was seeing them _everywhere_. Piston Peak Park was, apparently, incredibly crowded on a spectral level. He'd seen miners drifting in and out of the collapsed mineshaft where he and Dusty had sheltered from the blaze back in July, transparent boats bobbing on the still waters of Anchor Lake, a locomotive that had crashed fifty years ago crossing a railway bridge, and a few airframes of various types and sizes that drifted heedlessly around - and occasionally _through_ \- him while he was on patrol. He'd learned to dodge those when Nick didn't chase them off; getting drifted through left him painfully cold for long minutes afterwards. There were also a number of deceased park staff still hanging around the place, including someone he thought might have been the first Superintendent of the Park, an ancient-looking Ford that haunted the entrance road.

Blade had already decided that if Cad Spinner showed up to haunt the place instead of assuming his rightful place in the Smelting Pits after his death, Blade would hire an exorcist himself.

There were even a couple of ghosts here on base aside from Nick - a little purple Cessna that had struck the cliff twelve years ago, who mostly lingered near Dusty's hanger, and a much less distinct form of roughly Avalanche's size, which was generally around the Smokejumper's own hanger. He was probably a former Smokejumper, but he never showed up clearly enough for Blade to make out an identity.

Ghosts, fires, and meetings aside, his main source of worry in the past week had actually been from the last source he ever would have expected: Windlifter himself. Everyone on the team was feeling the strain of a long and relentless season of fires; Maru was getting snappish, Dipper hyperactive, the Smokejumpers increasingly restless, and Cabbie was getting mild but recurrent headaches.

And Windlifter, usually the very definition of unshakeable calm, had been... oddly tense for the last few days, enough so that Maru had actually banged on Blade's door last night to ask about it, unknowingly interrupting Blade's time with Nick.

It was probably just as well that nothing physical could be managed with a ghost; Maru didn't interrupt anything worse than a conversation, although he did give Blade a very odd look when he rolled in, undoubtedly having heard him talking through the door.

Neither Blade nor Maru - nor Nick, after Maru had rolled out again - had any ideas why Windlifter was acting quite so... not _twitchy_ , really, but... agitated.

It could have something to do with Halloween, although Windlifter had never really paid the holiday any attention before. And, while Blade had become very aware in the last few months that Nick was not the only ghost within the boarders of the park, none of Piston Peak's spectral residents seemed to find the holiday particularly inspiring thus far.

For the team, Halloween tended to mean the same as any other holiday during the season; not much, other than a handful of decorations around the base.

The Jumpers, despite the fact they'd been camping on coals for most of the month, had somehow managed to get corn sheaves and stacks of gourds - thankfully not the variety designed as fire hazards - arranged in front of their hanger. Patch had placed potted mums at the base of the tower ramp. Dusty had orange crepe paper streamers and pumpkins painted with blue and white stripes and number sevens decorating the front of his hanger, undoubtedly courtesy of Dipper. Windlifter, in a display of either seasonal whimsy or unadulterated snark, had strung bundles of Indian corn along the entire front of his hanger.

And Maru had put pumpkin spice coffee in the communal coffee pot this morning, which meant that anyone on base who wasn't awake at oh-six-hundred got a rude wake up call when Cabbie discovered it.

Dipper was the only one who didn't seem to have a problem with the flavor, and had drunk the entire pot as a result. Blade had sent her back to the base to reload after every single one of today's drops, partly because she'd needed to fly off the resulting jitters, but mostly because Maru deserved to have an over-caffeinated Dipper inflicted on him after messing with the coffee.

The Smokejumpers, for their part, where enjoying the benefits of both their pressure washers and their television after a string of long stretches in the rough, and making enough noise at it that they were probably keeping half the base awake. Even through his closed door, Blade could hear them shouting; normal enough for Avalanche, but rare for Blackout - who was the only one likely to be shouting in Spanish - and rarer still for Dynamite, who usually kept a tighter rein on her crew. Tonight, she seemed to be shouting just as much as the others.

Frowning, Blade rolled to his door and nudged it open a few inches, intending to catch the gist of their yelling to judge whether it would die out on its own, or needed his presence. Something about the voices didn't sound quite right, but it was nothing he could pin down through the muffling wood.

Even cracking his door open didn't help him any; they were shouting over each other too much for him to actually determine words. But through the opening, he caught a flash of green, moving fast across the base, had a momentary worry of an ill Deere, and then realized, with no small amount of alarm, that it was Windlifter, rolling across the concrete as quickly as his wheels would take him.

Blade was halfway down the hill from his hanger by the time he realized exactly what had sounded wrong about the Smokejumper's yelling - there were two voices yelling in Spanish, not one.

Blackout was the only member of the team who spoke Spanish with any fluency; everyone else had picked up a handful of words here or there, very few of which were fit for polite company. But his current conversation partner -

Blade felt his tires lock under him, his rotors flicking in alarm. He'd gotten so accustomed to hearing Nick's voice again, the rich twist of his accent flowing over familiar endearments, and the easy banter they'd fallen back into as though the last thirty years had never happened.

But in all the time Nick had been by Blade's side, none of the Jumpers had shown the slightest indication that they could see him. Certainly, none of them had gotten into a bellowing argument with him. As far as he was aware, Dusty and Windlifter were the only ones on base other than him who were aware Nick was here at all.

Unlocking his tires, Blade bolted after his Lieutenant.

He arrived at the Smokejumpers' hanger only a few seconds behind Windlifter, rolling up on the bigger chopper's port side. Doors on the other hangers were sliding open now; Dusty, yawning as he rolled out; Dipper, a glob of polishing wax forgotten on her nose; Cabbie, looking quite ready to quiet his team down by force if necessary. Even Patch had rolled out of the tower booth, looking down on the Base with obvious concern.

Blade ignored all of them, his focus instead on the interior of the hanger. The team had formed a half-circle around their unexpected visitor, engines all keyed up to threatening rumbles. None of them were quite to the point of brandishing their equipment as weapons, but didn't look like Blackout and Pinecone were too far off. Dynamite, parked slightly inside her half-circle of teammates, was snarling with a venom he'd never heard in her voice.

" - some kind of sick joke, you have no business being here and no right to do this to our Chief -"

Forcing down his own confusion, Blade rolled forward and barked out "Dynamite, stand down!" with enough snap in his voice that the entire Jump team... well, jumped.

"Blade!" Dynamite wheeled around, clearly startled. "This guy just appeared in our hanger, and he -"

Halfway through, Dynamite clearly rethought openly admitting her knowledge of CHoPs, which resulted in her nearly biting her tongue to cut off the end of her sentence.

Nick, resplendent in his full California Helicopter Patrol paint job, polished to a high shine, and unquestionably, physically _solid_ in the middle of the Smokejumper's hanger, didn't bother to smother his laughter. "Your fans always did have a way with words, Blaze."

"Yes, well, we know what yours had a way with," Blade shot back automatically, earning one of Nick's room-lighting grins.

Dusty, meanwhile, rolled up at Blade's side, still bleary-eyed and blinking. "Are we heading out?" he asked, the last word almost indistinguishable around a yawn, then, "And why's everyone staring at Nick?"

"Mostly 'cuz they can see me, would be my guess," Nick shot back, still snickering, and Dusty woke up in a hurry.

"Um, Blade," Dynamite began, eyes flickering between Blade and Dusty as though she expected one of them to explode at any moment, "what's going on here? This guy..." she trailed off again, looking frustrated enough to chew steel, and wordlessly waved a tire towards Nick.

"Looks and sounds exactly like my partner from my television show that we don't talk about," Blade completed for her, ignoring her sheepish wince. "That's because he is."

There was a very long moment of silence after that, and the looks that the Jumpers were exchanging would almost be amusing if it wasn't _his_ sanity they were very clearly questioning. Blade could hear the sound of tires on concrete behind him; Cabbie's heavy roll unmistakable, Dipper's approach only obvious because he could hear her urgent, confused whispers.

He waited until he heard them both stop within earshot, so that they wouldn't have to go through the explanation twice.

Once he heard Cabbie's sharp, startled hiss and Dipper's yelp, Blade shot a glance to his partner. "You wanna explain this, or should I?"

"Blaze, sweetheart, I'd love to explain this one, but I have no idea what's going on." A bit awkwardly, Nick took an experimental hop forward. "Chrysler, gravity is weird."

"Also, not your friend. Make sure you remember how to fly before you pick a fight with it this time."

"Oh, you're makin' jokes about it now? I guess the last few months have been as good for you as they have for me, huh baby?" Death - and whatever the Pits this was - hadn't lessened Nick's leer in the slightest.

"MY BRAIN HURTS."

"Join the club," Dynamite muttered, rolling out of the way as Nick took another couple of hops forward, not stopping until he was directly in front of Blade, grinning at him from inches away.

Oddly - because Nick had always been the more impulsive one - it was Blade who moved first, rolling those last few inches, twisting in a way his body remembered at a level below conscious thought, and catching Nick's lips with his own. He could feel Nick laughing into the kiss, and thought he might have been doing the same. Somehow, even on the other side of death and three decades, the taste of Nick's mouth hadn't changed.

"NOW MY BRAIN REALLY HURTS!"

"What in the Smelting Pits is going on here?!"

"Boss?!"

"I knew it!"

Avalanche, Cabbie, Dynamite, and Dipper, the last one being shrill enough for him to wince away from Nick's kiss. Dusty, who had edged away from him, was looking awkwardly in the other direction. Windlifter, on the other hand, was watching the pair of them carefully, his face oddly blank.

Ignoring the bewildered chorus from his team, Blade turned enough to stare at his Lieutenant. "Windlifter, you have some explaining to do."

The big Sikorsky had a ridiculously good innocent-confusion face - doubly so if you had the slightest idea of what he could get up to. "What makes you think this is my doing?"

"You're the only true medium on base, Windlifter," Blade pointed out, turning as he spoke to settle himself against Nick's side. The familiarity of the touch thrummed through him, settling hot and bright in his core. Much as he wanted to indulge it, disappear into his hanger with Nick and lock the door, this... sheer impossibility, this miracle, this... whatever it was, had to be explained.

If it wasn't, if he didn't know the why and the how, he'd spend every second terrified of losing Nick again. He'd barely survived the first time, and having had even a glimpse of what they'd once had was enough to convince him that he didn't want to live without him again.

"Yeah, not to mention, you've been actin' awful twitchy the last couple of days," Nick added, leaning a little more against Blade. "And I'm not complaining, trust me, but if there's any kind of time limit on this bein' physical thing -"

A clatter behind them, loud enough that everyone except Windlifter jumped. Blade knew that if he looked, he'd already have the first streaks of Nick's blue paint amongst his red. Then, before he could turn, the one voice that had so far been missing from the cluster around him spoke up.

 _"Nick?"_

Maru. He'd turned in early tonight, and Blade knew that the mechanic had planned to self-medicate himself into a decent night's sleep. When he hadn't shown up with the others, Blade honestly thought his friend was safely off in dreamland. Dusty scooted out of the way enough for Blade and Nick to turn, both of them facing their oldest friend.

Maru's metal cup lay on the cement beside him, dropped from heedless, shaking tines. Maru, who never trembled, never twitched, even forks-deep in his teammates, knowing that he was all that stood between them and the Reaper, knowing that sometimes he would unwillingly be forced aside.

Nick had been the first time the Reaper had pushed Maru away.

"No," Maru whispered, his horrified, wide-eyed stare fixed on the blue helicopter. "There's no way, it can't be -"

"Maru, it _is_ him," Windlifter's tone was firm enough that it would have brooked no argument - from anyone except their resident mechanic.

"Windlifter, I'm not sure how clear this was made to you," Maru snapped back, anger surging forward but not stopping the trembling. "But Nick Lopez is _dead!_ "

"Hey, don't I get a say in this?"

"No, you don't," Maru snarled back, and even a full length away, the smell of high-grade from Maru's breath and spilled cup was evident. "You know why you don't? Because you are DEAD, you idiot! Which means you're either some kind of freaky mass hallucination, or some crank with a lousy sense of humor here to torment Blade and I, and frankly, I don't like either option!"

"HE'S A GHOST!"

Thank you, Avalanche, for the clarification. And the earache.

Beside Blade, Nick sighed in exasperation. "I _was_ a ghost. Heck, I've been a ghost for thirty-somethin' years! But somethin' changed, 'cuz ghosts -" he tipped slightly, rocking over onto one skid to tap a rotor blade against Blade's roof, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to produce a metallic ring off Blade's plating, clear and sharp. Blade grimaced at the vibration. "Ghosts ain't _solid_."

"Wow, newsflash."

Blade was facing in the wrong direction to actually glare at Dusty. Even if he hadn't been, the weary sarcasm was a relief amidst the others' alarm and confusion.

"Maru, it is -"

Maru rolled backwards, his cup forgotten on the concrete, shaking harder than ever, anger, confusion, denial, and fear, all flickering across his face. "No. There's no way, Blade, we saw him die, I was there, I _felt him_ -" Maru drew in a rough gasp of breath and tore his gaze away from the helicopters in front of him, staring down at his shaking tines.

"I had my tines in him when he died. Even with the fire. I've still -" shaking his head, Maru gestured to some of the deeper pits and grooves scraped into the edges of his tines. "I've still got scars, Blade, from losing him, scars here," Maru looked up again, furious tears glittering at the corner of his eyes, and held his tines up to them for inspection, for judgement, before tapping one of those tines against the side of his head. "Scars here! And now all of you are just telling me that a hallucination I've never been able to shake is really -"

 _"You've been able to see me all along?!"_

Nick wasn't the kind of guy to get loud when he got angry. Unlike most, he got quiet, precise, and still, every word clipped and measured. At that moment, his words were barely above a growl.

"I haven't seen anything, because _you aren't here!_ " Maru, by contrast, got louder, sharper, and spoke with his tines, making sharp slashes around his body. "You never have been!"

"Maru -" Windlifter began, his voice urgent, but the forklift pivoted sharply around and took off for his workshop.

"Slag," Nick muttered, which Blade thought summed the situation up nicely. "Go, Blaze. Windy can explain this."

"I certainly hope so," Blade snapped, and headed after Maru at the best clip he could manage. The forklift, being designed for ground mobility, was faster than he was, but chances were good he was seeing at least double at the moment, which might slow him down just enough for Blade's needs.

Now, if Blade could just figure out what the Pits to say when he caught up to him...

[END CHAPTER ONE]

* * *

Notes: CH1 Notes: In regard to Nick's speech/accent: I've based his characterization (and voice) off his inspiration, Erik Estrada's character of Frank Poncherello on CHiPs. Erik is also Nick's VA, but his accent was noticeably heavier during the show's run ('77-'83) than when he was recording Nick's dialogue. While I'm not certain how obvious it is in textual format, in my mind, Nick has Ponch's voice, simply because it's a pleasure to listen to.


	2. The Most Romantic Thing Ever

Just a reminder, this story does follow _The Truth In Old Saws_ , and some of the dialogue in here won't make a great deal of sense if you haven't read that. (I can't guarantee it will make sense regardless, but anyway!) Warnings for this chapter include suggestions of PTSD, canon character injury/death, the Fourth Wall getting a bit dented, mentions of past societal homophobia, and Nick being... a bit perverse at times.

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER TWO **  
The Most Romantic Thing Ever (at least Dipper thinks so...)

* * *

Cabbie was the first one to turn to Windlifter as their Chief departed, the others following suit in short order. Dusty, for his part, edged over to Nick until he could bump a wingtip against the helicopter, looking faintly surprised when it made solid contact.

Nick glared sideways at him, still nettled from Maru's anger. "Anybody else wanna poke me and make sure I'm real?"

"Son, you don't _want_ me to poke you," Cabbie growled, and the Smokejumpers wordlessly rolled closer to their surrogate uncle, Dynamite by his nose, the others flanking out in front of his wings. Whether they were making a stand with him, or preventing him from squashing Nick like a Bug, nobody cared to guess.

"He is really real," Dusty offered, into the awkward silence.

"Uh-huh. And you've been able to see ghosts how long?" Dynamite's tone was cutting, her expression even moreso, but Dusty met her gaze squarely.

"Since my crash."

Well, that shut everyone up in a hurry. Dipper made a distressed sound, half gasp and half whine, and the Jumpers flinched as one. Even Cabbie grimaced, and Nick shifted enough to give Dusty's wingtip a careful, comforting bump.

"When I was in a coma, I was... stuck in nightmares. Everyone and everything I cared about was going up in flames. And I don't know how, but Nick came into my dreams -"

"That's creepy."

"He said the same thing," Nick grinned towards Blackout, who ducked behind his saw, looking startled to be addressed.

"He helped me get out of the nightmares," Dusty continued, raising his voice just enough to draw attention back to himself. "I was ready to give up. It's thanks to Nick that I woke up at all."

Which was news to Nick, if the surprise on his face was any indication.

Clearing his throat, Dusty deliberately met Cabbie's eyes - the retroactive horror in Dipper's expression was too much to face, apparently - and continued. "After I woke up, Nick poked me to remind me of something he'd said in my dream, and then I could just... see him."

"Just like that." Dynamite sounded, at best, unconvinced. "Are you sure you didn't hit your head harder than you thought?"

"Are you callin' Maru incompetent?" Nick growled, taking a half-hop forward, and Windlifter very quickly rolled to block him, staring him into submission.

"The awareness of spirits is not something granted to all," Windlifter explained, his voice patient and businesslike as he turned back to face the others, settling himself firmly beside Nick, his massive presence enough of a threat to discourage Nick's temper. "But in many cases, awareness of a spirit's existence, when combined with contact from a particular spirit, can open the senses to those who remain."

"Ghosts." Cabbie sounded distinctly unimpressed.

Windlifter's eyes flicked up, slightly to Cabbie's starboard, fixing on a point over the warplane's engine. Cabbie, looking as though it was against his better judgement, turned his eyes to follow Windlifter's gaze as best he could, then set his jaw and determinedly looked forward again. "Fine. Ghosts."

"Cabbie?" Dynamite rolled forward enough to turn and look the big plane in the eye.

Nick followed Windlifter's gaze as well, nodding what looked like a greeting. Cabbie's jaw tightened until his teeth audibly clenched.

"It is easier for those born without full awareness to sense the spirits of those who have meant the most to them," Windlifter continued. "Yours is -"

"Not the point of this discussion," Cabbie interrupted, and there was a thread of sharpness in his tone that sent Blackout and Pinecone out from under his wings, apparently without conscious thought. Even Avalanche ducked on his suspension, instinctively sheltering himself behind his blade, and Drip glanced warily upward. Dipper, who had been craning on her wheels in an attempt to see over Cabbie's body, dropped down until her belly almost brushed the concrete.

Cabbie closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, clearly forcing himself calm again, as Dusty exchanged wide-eyed glances with Pinecone. As the two newest members of the Air Attack team, neither had ever witnessed any suggestion of Cabbie's temper. Out of the group surrounding him, only Nick and Windlifter had ever seen him in full flare; both of them knew better than to spark it.

A bit tentatively, Dusty cleared his throat again. "Um. Where was I?"

"Seein' me for the first time outside of your dreams."

"How," Dusty asked, although he sounded as though he might rather not know, "do you manage to make that sound so perverted?"

"Natural talent, babe. All natural talent."

"Still creepy. Okay, so, after I woke up, I was obviously aware of Nick's existence, and when he poked me, it was enough to just... I don't know, throw a switch in my head or something." Dusty glanced to Windlifter for confirmation, and looked vaguely relieved when the big chopper nodded in response. "I... kind of thought I was losing my mind. Windlifter told me I wasn't, except he told me in front of Blade, so then we had to explain what we were talking about. But once Windlifter convinced Blade that we weren't both going crazy, Nick poked him too, and Blade was able to see him."

If Windlifter's eyeroll and Nick's snort were any indication, Dusty was simplifying the sequence of events by just a bit.

"So Blade's been able to see you since..." there was a miniscule pause while Cabbie filed back through the dates in his head. "Mid July?"

"See me, talk to me, have me talk to him -"

"That explains why he's been more cheerful the last few months."

"Also why he seems to be finding spotfires twice as fast as he used to. You've been helping him patrol, haven't you?" Dynamite asked, narrowing her eyes at Nick.

"I'm always out there with him anyway. Kinda makes sense to make myself useful, huh?"

"When you say 'always'... how long, exactly, have you been here?"

Nick glanced back up to meet Cabbie's gaze, his own expression one of mild annoyance. "You haven't been listening, big guy. I've been with Blade the whole time."

"The whole time being...?"

"Since I _died_ -" Nick bit off the end of his sentence with an audible snap of his teeth, clearly not wanting to call Cabbie whatever had been on the tip of his tongue.

"Wait, wait." The threat of Cabbie's temper diminished, Dipper popped back up to her full height, her props giving an excited twirl. "You've been here? All along? Following us around, watching us while we're unaware?"

"Y'ever hear that one about stones and glass houses, Dip?" Nick shot back, his tone of annoyance now mingled with amusement. "I've seen you outside Dusty's hanger at nights, you know."

"Wow. Among other things I really did not need to know? That."

Looking suitably chastised, Dipper sank down a bit, rolling cautiously backwards until she accidentally bumped Blackout, who yelped, which startled Avalanche enough that he jolted forward and ran the top corner of his blade into Cabbie's side, and Cabbie jerked away from the sharp pain and missed clipping one of Windlifter's rotor blades by a matter of inches.

Once the ensuing shouting calmed down and everyone had rearranged themselves with more than a few inches between them, Nick spoke up again, carefully biting back his snickers.

"I haven't been following you guys, Dipper. I've been following Blade."

"In which case," Cabbie grumbled, still nursing the gouge on his belly - which would probably require Maru's attention in the morning if he didn't want to risk a case of rust - "Why were you in the Smokejumper's hanger, and not Blade's?"

"Eh heh." Nick's grin took on a slightly sheepish cast. "Well, there's a new chapter of _Beat_ up that Pinecone was readin' -"

The Smokejumper in question gave a horrified squeak and hid her face behind her rake. Cabbie glanced between the two of them with a very reluctant expression.

"Do I want to know?"

"CHoPs slash fic."

"No," Cabbie sighed, "I did not want to know."

"You read fanfiction about your own series? Isn't that a little..." Dusty trailed off, clearly unable to find the right words.

"Kinky?" Nick offered, his grin back to full wattage, and Dusty clearly gave up. "It's worse than you think, kiddo, Blaze and I are the only two characters that get paired up in most decent fiction, for good reason. Although Graeter - "

"None of us needs to imagine that," Cabbie interrupted, ignoring Pinecone's curious peek over the edge of her rake.

"You're reading slash fic about yourself and Blade," Dusty reiterated, his eyes virtually crossed as though he was trying to stare at the idea now rolling around his head. "That's just... wow."

"Hey, you know what I'm talking about when I say 'slash fic', it ain't your first time, either."

Dusty winced. "That was really not my fault, my friend Chug was on a fansite, and there was this forum he forwarded to me without reading it first..." he broke off with a shudder that made his propeller rattle. "Trust me, El Chu and I? We did not have that kind of relationship."

"Oh, on the Wings Around the Love forum? I read that one. It was really bad," Dipper piped up from behind Cabbie - without thinking it through, if the wave of horrified embarrassment that washed over her face was any indication. "But that was before I knew you!" she added, a bit frantically.

Nick, snickering, bumped himself deliberately against Dusty's wing, turning the plane's attention back to him so that neither Dusty nor Dipper overheated from embarrassment.

"Well, Blade and I did - do? - have that kinda relationship," he announced. "Which, if anyone's got a problem with it -" Nick narrowed his eyes particularly at Cabbie and Dusty, who looked respectively annoyed and confused at his glare.

"Kid, there are a lot of things about me you don't know, and, if I have my way, none of you ever will know," Cabbie replied, the dangerous thread of earlier gone from his tone, but the warning still there all the same. "But believe me when I tell you that I do not have any kind of problem with you and Blade having any kind of relationship the two of you want."

Windlifter's eyebrows arched at that, as did Dynamite's, but both held their tongues. Nick, for his part, looked back at Dusty, who met his gaze with honest confusion. "Why would I have a problem with it?"

"Some people just do," Nick answered, raking his gaze over each of the others in turn.

"Hey, you refused the possibility of eternal peace in the beyond in order to remain with Blade. That's possibly the most romantic thing ever!"

Nick's eyes flickered ever-so-briefly to the space above Cabbie's starboard engine again before glancing back down to the Smokejumpers.

"NO PROBLEM HERE!"

Blackout shrugged when Nick's eyes caught his. "All good to me, jefe."

"Hey," Dynamite snapped when Nick's gaze moved to her, "quit looking for trouble. As long as you're keepin' the Chief happy, we're with you."

"What she said!" Drip shouted, which set Avalanche and Blackout off laughing too hard for Pinecone to even attempt answering, even if she hadn't hidden behind her rake again when Nick's gaze landed on her.

Windlifter, for his part, tipped a very speaking glance in Nick's direction. Taking the hint, Nick threw an apologetic smile at the group in front of him once the laughter had died down. "Sorry, you guys. I guess I forget how much the world's changed. Blade and I - well, a lot more people would've given us grief back then."

"Well, not here and not now," Dynamite replied, to enthusiastic nods from the rest of the Jumpers. "Here, you've got friends."

"Indeed," Blade spoke up from behind them, as he and Maru rolled back to the group. Maru had apparently splashed cold water on himself in an attempt to sober up, and was scrubbing himself down with a mostly-clean shop rag, trailing drops of water on the concrete. "Friends who would still like to know exactly how you're _here_."

"That's somethin' I'd love to wrap my mind around, too, baby," Nick grinned, greeting Maru with a tentative smile and Blade with an affectionate nuzzle before hopping around to pin Windlifter with a stare. "Lifty, you got some 'splainin' to do!"

* * *

"Maru - Maru, dammit, wait!" Rolling after the forklift, Blade felt his jaw clench in frustration. It was immensely tempting to just pin Maru down and _make_ him listen - but some days Blade was sure he still had dents from the first (and thus far, only) time he'd tried something quite that monumentally stupid. He had a lot of weight on Maru, but Maru, like many medics, possessed both very heavy wrenches and terrifyingly good aim.

"Maru!"

" _No_ , Blade!"

Inside the door of his workshop, Maru spun to face the chopper following him, backing up until he bumped into a heap of boxes stacked against the wall- in fact, directly under The Wall. "No. Don't even try, Blade, don't you dare try to tell me that Nick's back and okay. I know my failures follow me around -"

"Maru, what are you talking about?"

"Do you know how many nights since July I've spent staring at the back of my eyelids, watching you die from those burns? Or the number of times in my imagination Dusty's woken up without the ability to fly, because I wasn't good enough to fix him? Do you have the faintest idea how many times I've seen Nick since he died? Because he was the first time I really failed, Blade, I know I'm never gonna shake that one loose, but don't you dare tell me that it's all okay!"

Stunned silent, Blade could only stare for a moment. He'd had no idea. "Oh, Maru," he sighed, rolling forwards until he and Maru were side-to-side, just enough to brush against one another, feeling the forklift trembling against him. Maru had fallen silent, but his entire frame was shaking with his rough breaths.

"Maru, I'm not dead yet. Dusty's back winning races because of you. And Nick..." Blade paused, staring at the pictures on worn corkboard in front of his nose. So many old friends up there, now. Most of them, Maru never had a chance to save. Firefighting crashes tended to be abrupt and brutal; Dusty's was among the worst one of his team had ever survived.

Pressing his tongue against his teeth, Blade considered his words carefully. The truth was all he could offer. "He was never a hallucination, Maru. Nick... he didn't cross over, when he died. He chose to stay with me."

Maru leaned heavily into his side and mumbled something that might have been 'overdone plot.'

"Tell me about it. We need to fire our writers." One of the boxes was, thankfully, covering the magazine article on Nick's death, but his picture was still visible, that broad, familiar grin shining at him. "I didn't know Nick was with me. I wasn't lucky enough to see him like you did."

Maru made a noise somewhere between a sniffle and a snort against Blade's side, another frame-rattling shake coursing through him, but didn't answer.

"It wasn't until after Dusty's crash that Windlifter bothered to mention the fact that Nick's been following me all along. But once I knew, Windlifter helped me see him."

Maru's reply was an indistinct mumble that Blade thought might have contained the word 'crazy.'

"It was a fight to believe them, Maru. I've never believed in an existence beyond this one, you know that. But it turns out I was wrong. I've got Nick back, and it's almost what it used to be." A bit wryly, he added, "We certainly spend a lot more time just talking than we used to, though."

A wet, miserable snort against his side, which Blade supposed he deserved. Although they'd never actually been discovered while... occupied... Maru had rolled in on them in situations that certainly would have developed into compromising positions more than once.

"You actually caught me talking to him when you came to my hanger last night. He laughs at me about the Park Board."

"Everyone laughs at you about the Park Board." Maru's voice was thick, but finally distinct enough to understand. "All your acting ability, and you can't even scare a buncha sedans."

"It's not like I can threaten to give them a ticket."

"Point," Maru chuckled, a bit wetly. He was keeping his face too close to Blade's side to be seen, but he'd at least stopped shaking so fiercely. "Blade, I..."

Maru trailed off into silence, leaning into Blade's side again, and Blade could feel the slow, deep breaths Maru was drawing in. Blade stopped counting after ten of them, and it took several more before Maru spoke again.

"It's really Nick?"

Blade opened his mouth to reply, a wholehearted _yes_ , but was cut off by a sudden burst of shouting from near the Smokejumper's hanger. Even at a distance, he could identify Dipper's squeal, Blackout's yelp, Cabbie's shout, Avalanche attempting to apologize to someone, Dynamite trying to restore order, and Nick laughing fit to blow a gasket.

"Stupid question," sighed Maru, pulling away from Blade. "Lemme go get cleaned up."

[END CHAPTER TWO]

* * *

Notes: CH2 Notes:

Graeter - Blade and Nick's sergeant on CHoPs. This character is the expy of Sgt Joe Getraer, the longsuffering California Highway Patrol sergeant responsible for overseeing Ponch and Jon, the CHiPs characters on which Nick and Blade's CHoPs personas were based.

Wings Around the Love Forums: as far as I know, I made them up. But if you've been itching for a name for your Planes romance forum, knock yourself out. While it was originally going to be 'Wings around the Heart,' it occurred to me that anthropomorphic vehicles would not necessarily have or recognize 'hearts' as a symbol for romance and was therefore changed. I've left things like 'eyebrows' and 'shaking heads' in the narrative for the sake of not making myself _completely effing insane_ trying to explain their nonverbal reactions.

And if you ship Dusty/El Chu, my apologies. As it's rare-to-nonexistant, I figured it would offend the fewest people of any possible Dusty pairing.


	3. Windlifter is not El Nino

**ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER THREE**  
Windlifter is not El Nino

* * *

"Lifty, you got some 'splainin' to do!"

"Explain while I work." Shoving the rag into his tool holster, Maru rolled forward with a determined glint in his eyes. "If this idiot's really here, I'm gonna make sure he's here in one piece."

"Wha - you're gonna pop my hatches in public, Maru?!"

"You say that like you have any concept of shame."

Nick, pinned between Dusty and Blade at his sides and Windlifter at his front, couldn't get enough room to squirm away before the forklift got to him. "Slag, Maru, your tines are cold!"

"All right," Blade snapped, as the Smokejumpers didn't quite stifle their laughter fast enough. Mind you, Nick's voice did sound funny at that octave... "Windlifter. Start talking before I have Maru disable your flight systems."

"Little busy here," Maru grumbled. "Would you _be still?!_ " The latter was addressed to Nick, who was managing an incredible amount of squirming while keeping his skids firmly on the ground.

"He's ticklish, Maru," Blade reminded the forklift patiently, before pinning his stare back on Windlifter, who looked about as uncomfortable as anyone present had ever seen him.

"Blade," Windlifter answered, slow and wary, " _this was not my doing_."

The entire team fell quiet. Even the ever-present drone of Bugs in the woods beyond the base abruptly dropped off, leaving an echoing, ominous silence.

Maru pulled clear of Nick's hatch and all but slammed it behind him, startling almost the entire team into jumps and yelps as he rolled backwards, not stopping until he bumped up against Blade's side.

"Chrysler, you're all twitchy tonight," Nick grumbled, trying to catch a glimpse of Maru from the corner of his eye. "So? What's the prognosis?"

"I don't get this," Maru muttered, dragging the rag back out of his holster and scrubbing fitfully at his tines with it, not quite managing to hide their trembling. "This actually _is_ Nick Lopez. There's marks of injuries I remember him sustaining on set before his..." Maru flicked a tine, the word ' _death_ ' resounding unspoken in the flash of light reflected off the pitted metal. "I recognize my own damn solder-marks on those repairs. It's the same body that he..."

"That I went down with," Nick filled in, ignoring Maru's wince, and gave a sort of whole-body wiggle, checking himself over. "Except without that last bit."

Prying himself away from Blade's side, Maru glared in the general direction of Nick's nose. "Seeing as you're currently _not dead_ , yeah. Without that last bit."

"Windlifter," Dusty began, his voice carefully quiet against Maru's snarking, "if you didn't bring Nick back, then... who did?"

"I do not know," came the answer, accompanied by a portentous flash of lightning.

Drip, Blackout, and Dipper all yelped, the sound unmuffled by the growling roar of thunder, and even Blade shot a startled, mildly suspicious glance towards the sky before transferring the same look to his Lieutenant.

"You timed that, didn't you?"

Windlifter hummed noncommittally in response, eyeing the clouds roiling overhead. The storm _had_ sprung up rather abruptly, but then, they tended to do so around here.

"Maybe it's time we moved this discussion indoors?" Nick offered, not even trying to mask his laughter as another flicker of lightning lit the sky above them. Even Patch was rolling down from the Tower now; a tall metal structure on a cliff top was an awfully tempting target for lightning, and, rods or not, she had no desire to be in it if it got struck.

Bringing her up to speed, thankfully, was a matter of a few terse sentences from Blade, a matter accomplished as the team made their way into the main hanger.

 _'Yes, that is Nick Lopez. He's been following me as a ghost since he died. I've been aware of him since July, and we're now trying to determine why he's suddenly alive again.'_

She accepted this particular revelation with a level calm that rivaled Windlifter's usual disposition, but then, that was all part of her job description. She and Blade bore almost equal responsibility in keeping the team members safe, and the ability to absorb information under stress was an innate and necessary skill.

"So, Windy," Nick began, once the team had arranged themselves in a loose circle inside the main hanger, with some minor difficulty adjusting for the additional presences of Blade and Nick. "You said this ain't you, but if it's not, why've you been so twitchy all week?"

Rather to everyone's surprise, Blackout raised his saw for attention. "It's not just him," the young Smokejumper offered, sounding a little sheepish, when Blade raised an eyebrow at him. "This whole week, things have felt very strange."

"THERE IS A GREAT DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE!"

The _thunk_ of Blackout's saw connecting with Avalanche's canopy echoed nearly as much as the shout, but Dynamite, ignoring her teammate's squabble, frowned thoughtfully.

"They're right. Something's been just plain _off_ for a few days, we've felt it when we've been on the lines. The atmosphere feels..."

"Freaky-weird," Drip contributed, dodging out of the way as Avalanche nearly knocked Blackout into his side.

"Charged. Electric?" Blackout shoved his - thankfully sheathed - saw in front of Avalanche's face, preventing the brawnier Jumper from shoving him across the floor unless he wanted to risk an eye injury.

"Just on the the valley floor, though," Pinecone spoke up, safely on the other side of Cabbie from her squabbling teammates. "It's a lot calmer up here, or when Cabbie's takin' us around."

"For you, maybe," Cabbie answered, his eyes half-closed, clearly deep in thought. "But now that you mention it, the magnetic resonances dirtside have been a little off. Hadn't occurred to me until now. I thought we were all just starting to feel the strain."

"You've still got your mil-spec sensors, don't you?" Nick asked, and glanced sideways to Windlifter. "And you're just weird, so you pick up on everything anyway."

"Most of the Native tribes evolved sensor levels higher than mil-spec. The weird tends to be optional," Patch pointed out, earning a very faint smile from Windlifter in reply.

"Okay, so a magnetic resonance shift - knock it off, you two -" Avalanche and Blackout both froze at Dynamite's command, Blackout's saw arm bent at an uncomfortable-looking angle to poke Avalanche in the mouth. "Windlifter, any ideas you'd like to share?"

Windlifter grimaced, the expression startling on his usually deadpan calm. "About the resonance shift, no. Concerning Nick, perhaps. There are certain... rituals, dating back to the time of my ancestors, said to be able to return lost warriors from the beyond."

"I take it these aren't exactly common knowledge?" Blade, who had parked himself across from his Lieutenant, tail to the television, fixed Windlifter with his most piercing stare.

"No. They are also..." Windlifter trailed off, clearly searching for the right words. "They are not rituals I would ever consider undertaking, even under the most dire circumstance."

"Gee, Windy, think you could be any more obscure?"

Frowning, Windlifter sat up a little on his landing gear, emphasizing his height over Nick; not a threat, but certainly a warning. When he spoke again, his voice had lost all trace of his usual storyteller's cadence, and his words came out clipped and sharp. "All of the rituals require sacrifice. The exchange of many of the living in order to retrieve one of the dead. No matter how pure the intentions, this makes the rituals themselves a thing of wickedness. There is no one among my people now who would condone their use, or allow their knowledge to outsiders who would."

"They sound horrifying," Dipper said softly into the resulting silence, earning several uneasy nods around the circle.

"Do any of them work?"

Windlifter bristled for a moment, a surge of anger sweeping over his usually passive expression, and several of the younger team members actually edged away from him. Windlifter's natural quiet made it easy to forget his sheer mass - nearly twice Blade's size and well more than double his weight - and his anger was an intimidating thing. "Why do you ask me this?"

Blade, for his part, didn't even flinch, meeting Windlifter's gaze with defiant calm. "Because how many other ways are there for Nick to have come back?"

There was a moment of silence, the flash-crackle of lightning outside matched by the snapping tension in the hanger, before Windlifter sighed deeply, sinking back down on his suspension. "Blade, this is not my area of expertise. Seeing spirits is a gift of my mother's line, but the rituals you ask of are abhorrent things, things I have never studied. I know of their existence, and that is all."

"I wouldn't be asking if I had any other ideas, Windlifter." To his credit, Blade did sound apologetic. "That said, if anyone else has any ideas, please speak up."

"I've got an idea," Maru growled, tucked under Dusty's wing, his back to the corner. "That being that we all _get to sleep!_ That storm's gonna have spotfires galore started by tomorrow -" another aptly timed flash and roll of thunder cut him off, the lights within the hanger dimming briefly before returning to full strength. " - and I really don't need to cope with any of you idiots face-planting into the side of Canopy Dome because you were too busy debating the return of the boss's boyfriend to get any rest!"

"Seconded," Windlifter spoke up immediately, cutting off Blade's attempt at a reply.

"All in favor?" Cabbie asked, earning a chorus of none-to-reluctant 'ayes' from everyone in the hanger save Blade.

"What?" Nick grinned, unabashed, when Blade shot him a narrow-eyed look. "You never sleep more than four hours unless you're half-dead anyway. I figure we can take an hour an' finish getting reacquainted before you've gotta get some shut-eye. Your hanger's far enough out, so even if you are still a moaner -"

"You _really_ need to get that oversharing problem fixed," Dusty interrupted, looking like he'd like to scrub the last sentence from his memory. Cabbie was wearing a very similar expression, and Patch looked a bit like she'd been broadsided by a two-by-four.

Right. Blade had neglected to include the entirety of his and Nick's relationship in his very brief explanation.

"Blade wasn't the moaner, you idiot, that was you. At least it was every time you decided to take up on the roof of the building that was _right next to my trailer_."

"...oops?"

"Good night, everybody," Cabbie declared, and began the process of shepherding the jump team out. Windlifter followed, with the air of someone who couldn't quite escape fast enough, Dipper trailing behind him rather less enthusiastically at Patch's urging.

In what seemed like barely the time it took to blink, Nick, Blade, Dusty, and Maru were the only ones left in the hanger.

"...wow, yeah, this isn't awkward at all," Dusty mumbled, ignoring Nick's quiet snickers. "I'm just gonna... yeah." Rolling backwards, he managed to make his way to the door without any particular mishaps. "G'night Blade, Maru, Nick!"

"You can tell us to have fun, it's okay!" Lightning flickered as Nick spoke, the tempo of the flashes laughter-quick, and both Nick and Blade stared at the open doorway in bewildered amusement.

Dusty's _'gaaah'_ was nearly lost in the rumble of thunder. "Just - yes, have fun, and stop talking about it, Nick, please?"

"You really are doing that on purpose, aren't you?" Blade asked, the question almost entirely rhetorical, as Dusty vanished out the door. When his answer was silence instead of laughter, he turned enough to see the humor sliding away from Nick's face. "Nick?"

"Of course I'm doin' it on purpose, Blaze," he answered, voice gone soft and serious. "I've spent the last thirty years and change bein'... nothin'. You know how many times since I've died that I've wanted to tell a joke and have someone laugh? Or yell at someone and make them realize how stupid they're being? Because Windlifter - he's a great guy, I ain't denyin' that - but I could talk to him until my skids fell off and not get a reaction outta him even though he _could_ hear me. So, now, yeah. I'm messin' with their heads. I'm gonna do every damn thing I can think of to make every single member of your team laugh, and cringe, and smile when they see me, because I _can_. I'm gonna spend as much time as you'll let me making you forget your own name, because I can. And if this ain't permanent - don't gimme that look, Blaze, you know I'm not as stupid as I pretend to be - then I wanna take whatever the next offramp is on this damn highway knowin' that I didn't spend thirty years losing everything that it was to be _me_."

"You know," Maru began, when it became clear that Blade was at an utter loss for words, "you are the last person I ever would have expected an existential crisis out of, Nick."

"Yeah, well, _you_ try thirty years of that slag." Nick paused and shook his head. "No, on second thought, don't. These guys wouldn't last a week without you here."

"Tell me something I don't know. Actually," Maru held up a tine as Nick opened his mouth. "Don't, because I probably don't wanna know it. Go get some rest, you two."

"I'm starting to wonder who's really in charge around here," Blade muttered, earning a swat from Maru - "Why do you always aim for that spot in front of my hatch, you bolt-slagger?!" and a laugh from Nick.

"Ah, c'mon, Blaze, you know you love us!"

"Often against my better judgement, but yes. I do."

Smirking to himself, Blade rolled for the door while Nick and Maru stared after him, both speechless with shock. He could make much better time back to his hanger than Nick could, which meant that he'd be in the position of advantage when the other chopper made it up the hill.

Or so he thought, listening to the regular thunks of Nick hopping out of the main hanger, until that sound was replaced by his partner's engine spooling up.

"Nick, you cheating son of a slag-heap!"

"You idiot, I haven't cleared you to fly yet!"

Roaring with laughter, Nick soared overhead, as effortless in the air as he had ever been. The deep thrum of his engine and the steady beat of his blades sounded easy and clear, and he touched down on Blade's helipad with faultless grace, grinning broadly back at Blade and the incensed Maru.

"Shoulda disabled _his_ flight systems, never mind Windlifter's," Maru growled.

"Probably," Blade sighed, feeling a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth all the same. "This is Nick, after all. If he could have lived without landing, he would have."

"I know, I know. Just get him in my bay tomorrow so that I can make sure he's not gonna fall apart, all right?"

"Of course." Frowning, Blade watched as Maru headed off, clearly beelining for the storage shed and not his quarters. "Where are you going?"

"To find a spare retardant tank to refit!" Maru shot back. "You honestly think Nick's not gonna be in the air with you?"

The thought honestly hadn't occurred. "Maru, I can't have him on the team, it's a conflict of interest! The anti-fraternization policies -"

"Are ones you put in place, and can just as easily repeal," Maru pointed out. "Besides, do you honestly think anyone on this team would let frat regs stand in their way? They'd argue, ignore, or transfer their way out of them, but go 'Oh, no, I'm sorry, I can't fall in love with you because of _regulations_ '?" Maru drew the last word out to its sarcastic maximum, spreading his tines as if to encompass the absurdity of the concept.

Which Blade acknowledged. Firefighting in general, and wildland firefighting in particular, required a certain personality type, and his team embodied it to a tee. When they did something, they did it full speed ahead, and often without a brake check beforehand. While Dipper and the Smokejumpers were the most obvious about it, he wouldn't try standing in Windlifter or Cabbie's way if they'd made a particular decision, either.

Shaking his head, Maru waved him off. "Go, get reacquainted. The regs will keep until you figure out what you're doing. I'll dig the tank out in the meantime and make the adjustments tomorrow, so that it's ready."

"Tomorrow? Don't you think that's a little premature?"

"Premature. To think that one of the best acrobatic flyers in the world, who's been riding the tail of a twenty-five-year firefighter, can pass your certification exams. Yeah, sorry, that's real stupid of me."

Blade acknowledged the pointed sarcasm with a wry smile and a nod. "Goodnight, Maru."

"Goodnight, Blade. Remember to get some sleep."

A snort answered him. Blade was already rolling his way towards his hanger, where Nick waited with an inviting grin. "Don't worry about me, Maru. I'm going to sleep _very_ well tonight."

[END CHAPTER THREE]

* * *

 **CH3 Notes:** While I usually like to be an author who Does The Research, any resurrection rituals mentioned or suggested in this story are, to the best of my knowledge and awareness, absolute BS, rooted in the type of pop-culture depictions found on BtVS, Supernatural and the Mummy movies. Therefore, I expect (and hope) they are completely and utterly inaccurate. Said BS mentions and suggestions are not intended in any way, shape, or form to be offensive to ANYONE, of Native American descent or otherwise. Also, if you have knowledge of genuine resurrection rituals, please don't share it with me. Because honestly, I'd rather run with pop-culture BS than be aware necromancy is actually a real thing.

Do I actually _need_ to tack a disclaimer on the Star Wars reference? Trust me, I am not George Lucas. Or Disney.

 _Mil-Spec_ \- Military Standard. Presumably, Armed Forces aircraft would have been upgraded to and/or born with a more comprehensive array of sensors than civilian craft.

When I started this series - which, although I didn't realize it at the time, was back with Saving Tomorrow, several months before this work was conceived in its current form - the words 'Blade' and 'sex life' had no business in the same _story_ together, let alone the same _thought_. However, Nick, in his charmingly persuasive manner, somehow turned my thoughts around a hundred eighty degrees on the subject. If pressed, I would still describe Blade as demisexual, but yes, he and Nick did/do indeed have a healthy and active sex life.


	4. In Which Very Little Happens

Headcanon Notes: Because of the lack of, y'know, _hands_ on most of the major characters, the 'coffee cups' I envision for them are similar to the oil cans that have already been shown, with a spout-lid and (presumably) an internal straw. For ease of use by forklifts, they have a handle reminiscent of human coffee cups, as well. The design allows them to be picked up and tossed around (you'll see) without too much risk of spillage, and the cap can be screwed on or off to accommodate the preference of those with suitable appendages.

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER FOUR**  
In Which Very Little Happens

(but Nick and Cabbie get poked a lot)

* * *

A low murmur of voices dragged Blade out of the soundest sleep he'd had in... far longer than he cared to consider. Blinking his eyes open slowly, he winced when a beam of sunlight caught him square in the face.

The sunlight didn't come through his windows at that angle until ten o'clock in the morning at this time of year!

"...last time he slept like this was before I crashed, and if the park's not burning down..." That familiar murmur was Nick, who was over by the hanger door in full, brilliant physical form - which meant last night had not been a dream, or some Cinderella nonsense. Nick was still here in full, not gone back to a ghost or a pumpkin or whatever else Fate or Hollywood or fairy-tail metaphors might have decreed.

"It's not like you can't keep managing for another couple'a hours," Nick finished softly, still speaking through the narrow gap where the door had been rolled open a few inches. Squinting against the brilliant line of daylight flaring around the edge of the door, Blade could make out the sheer size of the shadowy form outside; Windlifter. There was also an odd combination of scents eddying in through the open door - Maru's characteristically overcooked coffee didn't take any guessing, nor did the smell of pine sap that followed Windlifter everywhere, but there was something else, a thick, springlike scent...

"It rained?!"

The question came out of his mouth even before his brain had finished processing it, but that was, unquestionably, the scent wafting in through his door - well-watered soil. Which verged on inconceivable, but...

"Hey, you're awake." Smiling gently, Nick nudged the door further open before maneuvering himself away, giving Windlifter room to set down the tray he'd been carrying in his mouth. "Windy brought us coffee," Nick added, a little unnecessarily. "You sleep okay?"

Blade stretched up on his landing gear, flicked his rotors, and gave himself a sharp, all-over shake before replying, indulging in the ever-so-slight aches resulting from last night's activities. Those twinges, so different from the aches of an overlong day battling nature and fire, were another confirmation that what he saw before him was real. "You made sure of that," he answered, finding his voice a little hoarser than expected. He should probably relocate Dusty if this was going to continue. Or at least find him some earmuffs. "It rained?"

His teeth clenched around the spout of his coffee and his eyes rolled back in bliss, Nick mumbled something incomprehensible in reply.

"Your manners are appalling," Blade informed him - not for the first time - before glancing over Nick at Windlifter, not bothering to stifle his grin. "It rained?"

"In the valley, yes. Dusty scouted at daybreak and reported all clear." When Blade raised an eyebrow at him, Windlifter's deadpan expression cracked into a faint smile. "Today is safe. The earth drank deeply last night."

"If I didn't know better, I would think you'd arranged that," Blade smiled, rolling forward to grab his own cup of coffee before Nick could make a move on it. He'd forgotten how much of a coffee junkie Nick could be, even for the overboiled tar Maru tended to serve up.

Windlifter - looking suspiciously smirky - was opening his mouth to reply when Cabbie's bellow from down on the runway cut him off.

"Windlifter! Ya mind tellin' me why there's an archeologist from Japan on my radio for you?"

Nick coughed a little, but managed to refrain from spraying coffee on Blade's floor. "Japan?!"

"England," Windlifter replied nonsensically, turning himself around and heading down the hill at a good clip.

Blade and Nick didn't even have to exchange glances; they headed for the door in unison, Nick only pausing to grab at Blade's coffee -

\- only to have Blade's hoist cable flick out, hook neatly snagging the handle of the cup, and yank it back to its rightful owner before he could even get his lips on the spout. Blade smirked as he slammed his hoist hatch shut over the cup and headed down the hill.

"Cheater!" Nick laughed, and bounded exuberantly after his partner.

They made it down to Cabbie's hanger while Windlifter was still nosing at the volume button on the radio - the headphones that Cabbie wore were too large to fit anyone outside of the big warplane's weight class, so all that really could be done was use them as speakers. The voice coming through them now, however distorted by irregular hiss-pops of static, was clearly not Japanese, but English, and laden with exasperated impatience.

 _"Windlifter, if this is another one of your jokes, I am going to find some way to make your life miserable regardless of how many miles are currently between us."_

Windlifter sighed heavily, the sound gusty against the microphone. "It is not a joke, Victoria. Did you find anything?"

 _"You contacted me ten hours ago, asking me to find written records of historical narratives, which your own tribe apparently does not possess, dealing with Native American resurrection rituals, when my area of expertise is pre-Chrystian Asian culture and I'm currently in Gyōda."_

Windlifter didn't respond, just stared patiently at the radio.

 _"Fine, yes, I called in a favor or three - for which you will owe me dearly, I was saving those - and copies of the histories you asked for will be arriving at the Park's airbase by courier, you should have them tomorrow. And you owe me an extra boon for the Saturday delivery."_

"You will have it. I appreciate this greatly, Victoria."

 _"I should bloody well hope so. Are you going to tell me exactly who came back from the beyond to have you scrambling after this information at such unholy hours? I know my clock tends to fritz, but wasn't it the middle of the night for you?"_

Windlifter grimaced slightly, shooting a sideways look to Blade that came as close to a plea for help as anything he'd ever seen on the bigger chopper's face. Nick, with a slag-eating grin on his face, leaned closer to the microphone.

"L.A. Seven-Mary-Four, Officer Nick Lopez responding."

There was a long moment of dead silence at the other end, before a static-laden burst of laughter rang over the line. _"Of course, who else? Thank you for the laugh, Windlifter. Now, if you don't mind, I really do need to get some sleep. Enjoy your histories."_

Windlifter hesitated over the microphone, clearly wondering whether or not to explain that Nick's voice hadn't been a recorded soundbite, before shaking his head slightly. "Thank you. Be well and go with peace, Victoria."

 _"Hmph. I'll be here for the next three days, do let me know if there's anything else impossible that you'd like me to manage for you. Or just call and say hello on occasion, rather than making my sister do it for you? If you haven't reached your word quota for the week, that is."_

Blade snorted loudly enough for the microphone to pick up. "We put him through the wringer yesterday. I think he used up a couple months worth of talking in an hour."

There was a blurt of static over the line that might have been a sputter of surprise from Victoria. _"Blade Ranger? I must admit, I'm shocked to hear you in on this tomfoolery."_

"You wouldn't be if you could see us now," Blade shot back, bumping lightly against Nick's side when the smaller chopper opened his mouth. The current situation would be difficult at best to explain even face-to-face, let alone over a balky radio connection.

 _"Well, it's certainly good to hear from you, but -"_ the static hissed over her yawn - _"I really do need to bid you a good night. Keep your tails out of the fire. Lucas out."_ The connection broke off with a jarring scratch of static, loud enough to make all three helicopters wince.

"Well, she sounds like fun," Nick chuckled, eyeing Blade's hoist hatch as though he could see the cup of coffee sitting behind it. "And, jeez, we coulda used a researcher like that on the show."

"On the rare occasion the writers did any research, certainly."

Windlifter, busying himself putting the radio settings back to normal, made a noise that could have been either agreement or derision in equal measure, and rolled off to the main hanger without a word. Talking to much did tend to exhaust the introverted Sikorsky, particularly having to reach out on the radio, which he'd apparently spent time last night doing. Blade made a mental note to thank him later.

Popping his hoist hatch, Blade gave the cable a flick that challenged a few laws of physics to set his own coffee down on the concrete in front of him, paused, and took a moment to glance around the base. He'd noticed the quiet earlier, but hadn't really had a chance to take stock. "Where is everyone?"

Cabbie wasn't in question; he was over by the workshop, Maru puttering around and cursing at something low on the warplane's side. Patch, of course, was up in the Tower, but that still left two planes and five Smokejumpers unaccounted for.

Given how quiet-impaired the Smokejumpers were, he tended to worry when they were on base and he couldn't hear them. It tended to mean spontaneous bouts of kleptomania, occasional structural damage, and an excess of work for Maru.

"The kids're down at the Lodge."

Blade blinked towards Cabbie, surprise and confusion each prodding their way towards being his predominant reaction. "Why, exactly, are they down at the Lodge?" Hopefully Avalanche and Drip weren't _inside_ the Lodge. And if they were, hopefully the floor repairs weren't coming out of the Team's budget. Hardwood floors and dozer treads did not mix.

"Jammer radioed this morning, asked if they'd be willing to do some last-minute cleanup on that haunted trail thing from the storm last night. You were still snoozing, so Windlifter cleared it. They headed down around nine."

The 'haunted trail thing' was something that had been running on and off through the entire month of October, with occasional closures due to the fires in the park. Several winding miles of trail through the woods - portions of which were bordered by cold, fire-blackened skeletons of trees from earlier blazes, making it all the more eerie - had been crammed with ghosts, monsters, and haunted graveyards made of everything from plywood to paper-mâché. Staffed by park rangers and local volunteers in temporary monster paint, it was meant to provoke a harmless scream or twelve from those who enjoyed the commercialized drivel that Halloween had become.

Blade, never having had much use for Halloween, had inspected the trail enough to ensure it was no more likely to catch on fire than the rest of the park and left it at that. It looked appallingly cheap and fake in the daytime, but at night, lit only by the moon, colored lamps, and quivering headlights, it might turn out all right. Cheap special effects could make a big difference - he'd seen that often enough on CHoPs.

Mind you, special effects or not, it was the people involved that tended to make the biggest difference, and chances were very good that Jammer had picked up five more good volunteers. Dynamite might find the monster paint below her dignity, but the other four would jump at the chance. Literally, if they could convince Jammer to let them put a ramp somewhere on the trail. Flying ghost effects, anyone? And Dynamite would no doubt keep things behind the scenes running flawlessly.

"They drove down?" Blade asked, scooting forward a few inches to block Nick's attempt at his coffee. It was a long road down to the Lodge, and not one quickly accomplished when most members of one's party were designed for power over speed.

Maru ducked down enough to shoot a glare at Blade from under Cabbie's belly. "The last time you slept through Cabbie taking off, you'd just melted half your innards and crashed into a field. None of us were gonna wake you up when you were sleeping past dawn for once in the last thirty years. Besides, they wanted the hike. Guess two days of downtime had 'em antsy after the season we've had."

If that were true, the implications for the off-season were absolutely terrifying, and best not considered. "Dusty?"

"Training in Augerin."

"Dipper?"

"Stalking Dusty."

Of course. Still, better that nobody - even Dusty - ran Augerin without another pair of eyes present. And it put her obsessiveness to good use, too; she'd be certain to let Maru know if Dusty had overtaxed himself.

"When I'm done with this, drag Nick over, and I'll make sure he's actually fit to be off the ground," Maru called over, once again hidden from their view by Cabbie's bulk. Whatever 'this' was that Maru was doing was making the otherwise-impassive warplane's ailerons twitch madly, which, for Cabbie, could have meant itchy, ticklish, or _really slagging painful_.

The smell of hot solder caught Blade's nose a second later, which probably meant it was a combination of all three. "What happened to you?"

An eyeroll and a huff preceded the answer. "Avalanche happened. Everyone was so damn keyed up last night that he ran into me by accident. Nice gouge from the corner of his blade."

Which explained both Cabbie and Avalanche's shouting from the chaos last night, if not anyone else's. "Sounds painful."

Cabbie's ailerons quivered. "I've had worse."

Unbidden, Blade felt his eyes slide towards the warplane's tail. There were still raised weld marks on the inner side of his port tail, mostly hidden by the white stripes of his paint, where a section of plating about three feet square had been replaced. The repairs had likely been done by a mobile hospital if the brutally efficient nature of the welds was any indication.

"I'm sure," Blade replied, looking away from Cabbie's tail to block the smirking Nick from his cup again, his eyes automatically cataloguing the familiar marks on his partner's body. There was a long crease in the metal of Nick's port skid from a bad stunt landing in one of their first few episodes, and a tiny dimple in the metal under his left eye where a piece of debris from a stunt explosion had clipped him late in the first season. (It was those two scars that had told Blade, early on and without words, how much of a sappy, sentimental romantic his partner really was. That bad landing had been the first time Blade had worried over Nick on set, and the dimple was the first spot on him Blade had kissed. Nick had kept them both when countless others had been smoothed over and fixed.)

Everyone at Piston Peak had scars - some, like Cabbie's, larger and more obvious, and some, like Blade's, invisible to the eye. Blade knew the stories behind a few of the others' scars - the high-grade did tend to come out at the end of the season, and while Blade couldn't touch Maru or Windlifter's tolerance, he also never drank enough that he forgot the stories by morning. Every scar had a story, told a story, and Nick, inveterate daredevil that he was, had a book written into his body.

Blade knew every single one of Nick's stories. And, he realized, frowning at Cabbie's tail, Nick was the only one he could say that about. He knew a lot of Maru's - thirty-some years living practically under each other's plating gave you a lot of perspective on someone - but Maru had history, too, a lot of which he made a point of not mentioning. But the rest of his team? He knew the scars were there, but most of them were still blank pages to him.

"Deep thoughts, Blaze?" Nick asked, only barely comprehensible around the spout of a coffee cup. _Blade's_ coffee cup, Blade realized, and gave his partner a rough nose-bump away from it. Nick hopped backwards, laughing, as Blade caught the spout in his teeth and finally took a good mouthful. It had cooled to tepid, but was fixed perfectly to his taste, and he mentally added another mark to the ongoing tally of things he needed to thank Windlifter for.

"Scars," he answered finally, when he'd drained half the cup, and Nick's eyes flickered towards Cabbie's tail.

"Yeah, Blaze, I getcha."

And, Blade knew, he really did.

* * *

Two hours after Cabbie had trundled off to his hanger again, Maru had finally finished every test, examination, poke, prod, and question he could think of to determine Nick's state of health and, well, _Nick_ -ness, and concluded Nick to be 'annoyingly perfect.'

"It took you two hours to figure that out?" Nick laughed, earning himself a sharp swat. "Jeez, Maru! You haven't changed a damn bit, have you?"

Blade just shook his head in fond amusement, not bothering to stop the soft chuckle from escaping him. "Neither one of you has changed."

"Should we be flattered or insulted by that assessment?" Maru asked, working on making threatening gestures with an oily shop rag. It was marginally successful, which was alarming in and of itself.

"You're both still loud, obnoxious, and driving me to distraction. In very different ways," Blade added quickly, seeing Nick and Maru both open their mouths, near-identical smirks on their faces. "Maru, is he cleared to fly?"

The forklift made a face, the previously threatening rag now flapping absently. "Blade, he's in better shape than you are, and that's saying something, considering how much of you I've fixed lately."

"Better than new, huh?"

"You tell me, baby," Nick purred, already putting power to his rotors. "You had a chance for a performance assessment last night."

Since neither Blade nor Maru would bat an eye at lascivious snark from Nick, Blade glanced behind him - sure enough, Dusty, who had returned for lunch half an hour ago, Dipper on his tail, was rolling by, easily close enough to overhear.

Dusty, instead of cringing as Nick had undoubtedly hoped, only shot a weary glance at Maru. "No fix for that oversharing problem, huh?"

"Ain't gonna fix that one without welding his mouth shut, kid," Maru shot back, half-hidden behind the toolbox he was busy organizing his wrenches into. There was something in his tone of voice, the slightest hint of mischief, that warned Blade of Maru's next line barely a split-second before it was spoken. "And Blade _likes_ his mouth."

Dusty cringed, Nick whooped with laughter, and Blade shook his head in resigned amusement. Nick conniving with Windlifter was bad enough, but if Maru signed on as well? The union of that unholy trio would mean that no one on the Base would survive the next prank war unscathed, Blade included. Windlifter might have justly feared Blade's wrath, but the other two sure as Pit didn't.

Dusty, despite only having known Nick for a few, often-interrupted months, seemed to follow Blade's thoughts perfectly. "We're all doomed, aren't we," Dusty sighed, his eyes tracking Nick as the chopper lifted off, grinning brightly enough to challenge the sun.

"Completely and utterly," Blade agreed, smiling wryly all the same.

[END CHAPTER FOUR]

* * *

CH4 Notes:

*Cabbie seems to have a larger and longer-range radio setup than the rest of the Base, which is why he's the one taking Windlifter's call.

*Gyoda - located in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, this city contains the Saitama Prefectural Museum of the Sakitama Ancient Burial Mounds.

*Victoria Lucas, Windlifter's source, is an anthropologist who works as a curator for the British Museum. She spends a lot of time in South and East Asia on joint research trips and negotiating the loan of exhibit items. And if she reminds you of a certain character from a certain series of movies featuring an undead ancient Egyptian high priest and those fighting to keep him from doing Horrible Things to the world... it's entirely possible we have the same (brilliantly horrible or horribly brilliant) taste in movies. She's an import from my perpetual WIP, The Epic Cars Fanfiction (Explicitly Not 'OF DOOM'), which is undergoing revisions to become part of the _Hallowed_ 'verse.

*Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, or M*A*S*H Units, were were set up near the front lines of battle. Their function-over-form 'meatball' surgery was focused on keeping the patient alive long enough to reach larger and more advanced hospitals, and was not overly concerned with the aesthetic outcome of the operation.


	5. Please Don't Feed the Smokejumpers

Because I'm not sure I say it enough, I do want to thank AmbulanceRobots again for her amazing stories, as well as her continued tolerance and support over on AO3. I've lost count of the War Stories references in this chapter alone, so, as per usual, if it looks like a reference, it probably is.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER FIVE**  
Please Don't Feed the Smokejumpers

 _"Your jump crew are insane."_

Nick, a safe distance from the microphone, snorted in amusement. "It's taken him this long to figure that out? He met them months ago!"

Blade shot his partner a quelling look that was, as expected, utterly ignored, and turned his attention back to the microphone, now hissing with the same bursts of intermittent static that had punctuated the call from Windlifter's friend. He'd been half-expecting a call from the Lodge since lunchtime, although admittedly he hadn't expected Pulaski to be the one making it. Thankfully, he'd developed a reasonable relationship with the Lodge's fire engine after Cad's departure, eased once he'd realized that Pulaski's sense of humor was not terribly dissimilar to his own. "If they're causing trouble, I'll have Cabbie come and retrieve them."

 _"Not what I meant, sir."_ There was the faintest note of embarrassment in Pulaski's voice. _"They've been a tremendous help so far. They're just very..."_

"Enthusiastic?" Blade offered, at the same time Nick, now closer to the microphone, muttered "Crazy?"

" _Yes, sir._ "

"Please tell me they haven't given those lunatics candy!" Maru shouted from outside of the hanger, where he was doing... something... to a retardant tank. It seemed to involve his aluminum-welding setup (logical), a hose (understandable), coffee (Maru), and... something that Blade thought might have been glitter (oh, Pits).

Blade didn't want to know. He really, _really_ did not want to know, because if he knew, he would either have to stop whatever was being done or be culpable in allowing it, and if this was a plan that Nick and Maru had conceived, he was better off staying as far away from it as possible so that he could plead the fifth when it was all over.

" _We haven't_ given _them candy, per se._ " Ah, right, Pulaski was still on the other end of the line. " _Although they may have acquired some of tonight's stock."_

Nick snorted again. "Do you have any stock _left?_ "

There was a shuffle on the other end of the line before Ranger Jammer's voice came cheerfully back to them. _"Well, they cleaned us pretty well out of Kit-Kats, but given the amount of help they've been to us, I'd say it was well worth it. They've done a spectacular job on fixing up that trail, Blade, and we're delighted to have them here tonight. You and the rest of your team are more than welcome as well. I know there are a few folks returning from the Grand Reopening that wanted to give their thanks to all of you."_

"They came back to the park after _that?_ " Even if he'd been unconscious in his hanger for some of the exciting bits, he'd heard about all of them. Repeatedly. At varying length, volume, and degree of embellishment, depending on who was doing the telling.

" _Some people don't have enough excitement in their lives, I suppose,_ " Jammer answered musingly.

" _Nothing we would know anything about, sir,_ " Pulaski chimed in, dry as dry could be, and Blade actually had to fight back a snicker. Nick didn't bother to try.

" _Not at all,_ " Jammer answered, surprisingly wry for the old bus, before a blurt of static rolled over his next words. " _Well, Blade, we really just radioed to thank you for the loan of your people, and the invitation does stand. We'd all love to see you and your team down here tonight."_

Blade, opening his mouth to politely refuse - the others were welcome to go, but crowds were an uncomfortable proposition for him - grunted in surprise as Nick bumped him aside.

"And we'd love to be there, sir. What time does the party start?"

Blade's glare, often suggested to have the capability of flash-freezing Maru's welding torches, had no effect whatsoever on Nick. Not that it ever had... Nick's largely-imperturbable cheer was as much a part of his charm as his smile.

" _Well, the trail opens at seven, but you're welcome to come down any time after five, that's when we'll have the treats out,_ " Jammer replied, apparently not batting an eye at the change in conversation partners. The static on the line was bad enough to be annoying, but not so severe that anybody would be able to confuse Blade's voice with Nick's.

"Sounds great," Nick answered, his grin audible. "We'll see ya tonight, Lodge. Base out."

If either Jammer or Pulaski wondered at the abrupt sign-off, neither of them attempted to question it before Nick cut the connection.

Just as well he had, too, because Blade wheeled around and pinned Nick with a stare so intense that Blade's own eyes ached with it. "What the Pits was that, Nick?"

Nick just arched an eyebrow, his laughter gone, the level seriousness he so rarely displayed firm on his face. "It's called livin', Blaze. Neither of us have been doin' a whole lot of it over the last thirty years."

When Blade stared at him, caught between ebbing outrage and rising guilt, Nick hopped forward and gave Blade a gentle nuzzle. "Look, baby, just give it a shot. If you hate it, both of us come back, no harm, no foul. But give it a try, huh?"

"I -" pausing, Blade heaved out a sigh. "Nick, I can't -"

"I know, baby. You've never liked crowds, and it got worse after my crash. It reminds you of the memorial, or the reporters, or whatever horrible thing that you don't wanna remember. But this is where you could learn somethin' from the planes, you know - you can't just hover. At some point you gotta move forward."

"You know," Maru remarked as he rolled past, startling both helicopters into jumping, narrowly avoiding bashing their noses together, "I always forgot smart you were. Smart-afted, I remembered. Actually smart... I guess I tended to block that part out."

" _Maru_ ," Blade growled, his tone threatening enough that the forklift actually snapped to attention.

"Yeah, Blade?"

"Get out. Before I ask you what you're planning on doing with the glitter."

"Aw, did I interrupt a Moment? Again?"

Blade's wordless growl sent Nick into a fit of laughter, and Maru wisely rolled to the door, his smirk completely undiminished.

Still growling, Blade moved past him, firmly resisting the urge to give the forklift a solid bump as he went by. Maru's shade of purple looked horrible streaked into Blade's paint, and the last thing he wanted was to wind up needing a respray an hour before the party.

Speaking of which... turning back, he glanced at Nick, still gleaming blue and white, the CHoPs badge in brilliant gold. "Are you planning on wearing those colors tonight?"

"Maru doesn't have my color in stock, and your red ain't gonna work on me, Blaze. Besides, it's Halloween, I get to be in costume."

"Just try not to get yourself arrested for impersonating an officer," Blade advised dryly. Never mind that Nick's design was thirty years out of date; the real California Highway Patrol had switched to a predominantly white paint scheme with paler blue accents years ago. But nowadays, they wouldn't have the understanding or friendship of the actual CHoPs division if someone _did_ happen to mistake Nick for a police officer.

"Hey, everybody!" Maru bellowed from the door, Blade wincing away from the shout. "Scrub off, we've got a party to go to!"

* * *

"Oh, there you are! Winnie, look who I found!"

Blade, not having expected the voice right by his tail, managed to keep his jerk of surprise down to the barest twitch of his rotors, and had forced a polite expression onto his face before he turned around. Nick, hopping clear, made a faint, startled sound at the sight of the two old campers beaming at Blade.

"Oh, it is you! You're the one that saved our lives, you and Dusty! We saw you at the Corn Festival, but never did get a chance to thank you for what you did that night, Chief Ranger."

Blade's memories of the night of Dusty's crash were blurred at best - the smoke inhalation and pain, not to mention whatever Maru had put into his system - had left him functioning on automatic, but the two old RVs smiling up at him did manage to trip a recollection loose. "You're the pair from Augerin Canyon."

"Right you are, son! Say, is that big green fellow of yours here tonight? He gave the most interesting toast the last time we were here..."

Off to Blade's side, Nick choked slightly, and Blade bit the inside of his cheek to stamp down his smirk. Maru had related the toast-to-Coyote business to him after the fact, which... well, Windlifter's main hobbies were working out and confusing the ever-loving slag out of everyone who would listen to him.

Occasionally both at once, but that was harder to manage.

"He spent a chunk of last night doing some research for us, and was too tired to come down tonight," Nick offered smoothly, taking another hop forward to peer around Blade's nose. Windlifter, Cabbie, and Patch had all declined the invitation to the party for varying reasons; Cabbie had a headache, Patch wanted to do research on something, and Blade had a sneaking suspicion Windlifter had gone to sleep early to make up for the varying stresses of last night.

"Oh, well, I hope he gets some good rest - and oh, my, what a lovely costume! You look exactly like that officer from the old TV show, doesn't he, Harvey? I can't remember the actor's name, but you do look just like him!"

"Yeah, I get that a lot," Nick answered, the irony in his smirk missing them. "An' the paint's real sharp, but I'll be glad to get back to my own colors," Nick answered, turning shamelessly into the light so that it gleamed off his badge.

"Well, you do look spectacular, son. A dead ringer -"

Unnoticed by the two RVs, Blade winced.

"- for that actor fellow, the one that got himself killed, what was his name? Loopy something?"

"Lopez," Nick corrected, although his smile had dimmed from charming to coolly polite. "Nick Lopez. His nickname was Loopin' Lopez, though, because he could perform a technique called an inside loop, a very unique and difficult stunt for a helicopter, which involved -"

The RVs' eyes had glazed over already. The majority of audiences hadn't credited Nick as the smart one; even Blade himself had made the mistake, early on, of thinking that Nick was nothing more than a dumb adrenaline junkie getting by on his smile. He'd found himself eating that thought and damn near choking on it when Nick had explained the physics of his inside loop using... well, physics. Never Blade's best subject - he'd been more of a literature type - but fascinating to listen to, especially in Nick's warm tones.

Also, as Nick aptly demonstrated, a brilliant form of revenge against anyone less willing to listen to a helicopter spout formulas including expressions like 'drag coefficients'.

Seeing Dusty and Dipper rolling up to join the conversation, Blade sent the pair a nod, gave Nick a light brush with his nose, and rolled a little ways away, just trying to escape the noise. The speakers were thumping out music, something with a heavy bass that a cluster of vehicles were wiggling around to - it wasn't organized enough to call 'dancing' - on the flagstone courtyard. Closer to the main doors of the Lodge, long buffet tables had been set up, lit every few feet by fire-hazard-gourds ("Can't you just call them Jack-O-Lanterns for once, baby?" "I call 'em as I see 'em, Nick, you know that."), and overburdened with apple cider and every conceivable permutation of pumpkin ever put into an edible item.

Pumpkin-oatmeal-raisin cookies, really?

Maru, who did not share Blade's objection to all things pumpkin, was at the tables, chatting with the waitstaff and heaping an improbable number of miniature pies (pumpkin, of course, although Blade thought he smelled apple as well) on his plate. He seemed perfectly at ease, something Blade wished he could claim.

There was something making his plating prickle down here - maybe the reminder of Nick's loss, maybe the 'weirdness' the Smokejumpers and Cabbie had mentioned, maybe...

Maybe the feeling that he was being watched? Frowning, Blade turned a little, trying to pin down the origin of the stare, but without success. It was something that had made him uncomfortable even in the Hollywood days - he'd always preferred admirers that would come up and actually talk over the ones that hid behind hedges and sidewalk signs, staring. Feeling gazes he couldn't source always made him -

Screams erupted from the woods, not cheerfully spooked but genuinely panicked, and Blade had his engines halfway spooled up before the sounds from behind him registered as well; the unmistakable snickering of his two best friends.

Blade exhaled, slowly, cutting his engines and letting his rotors slow to a stop before turning to face Nick and Maru, both of whom were making their way towards him, looking far more entertained than they should have. Behind Nick, Dusty and Dipper were still chatting amiably with the two RV's - if Dipper's cheerful pantomiming and Dusty's sheepish grin were any indication, discussing his Red Bulldozer series win in Las Vegas two weeks ago. "What, exactly, have you two done?"

"We didn't start it," Maru began, snickering into his cider. "But one of the groups waiting for the trail tour to start was hassling their guide earlier, and Dynamite had this plan..."

"We're only doing it to the obnoxious ones," Nick cut in. "But we've got it worked out with the guide. Dynamite goes along with 'em, heckles the tour guide to get in with the bad part of the group, that sorta thing. But near the end of the trail, the rest of the Jumpers pop out of the woods, playin' monsters, snag our girl, and drag her off."

"And it sounded like an Oscar-worthy performance," Maru grinned, toasting the trail head with his cider. "Here, Blade, gotcha pie." Without waiting for a response, he shoved one of the miniature pies - apple, as Blade had hoped - into Blade's mouth, ignoring the resulting indignant noise, now muffled by pastry and fruit.

Very good pastry and fruit, Blade admitted to himself as he chewed, although that didn't excuse Maru force-feeding it to him. Nick, meanwhile, was munching happily on something as well; Blade eyed the number of apple pies left on Maru's plate and didn't like the odds.

"If that's pumpkin pie you're eating, rinse your mouth out before you kiss me."

Nick made a garbled sound that could have been either surprise or agreement, nearly choked, and swallowed the pie, probably in somewhat larger pieces than he had intended. "I still don't know what you've got against pumpkins, Blaze."

"I just don't like it, is that so hard to - what?"

Nick was staring past him, into the woods, wearing an expression of mildly worried surprise. "Huh. Wasn't expecting to see him tonight."

"Him, whom?" Turning, Blade followed Nick's gaze, but could only make out a blurry flicker of whiteness amidst the trees. Resisting the urge to squint, Blade let his eyes unfocus slightly, angling his gaze off to one side rather than looking at the blur straight on. It was a trick Windlifter had coached him through, with his usual obscurity, after Blade became attuned to the existence of ghosts a few months prior. _'Sometimes, to truly see what you seek, you must look beyond it.'_

Blade, despite having become relatively fluent in Windlifterese over the years, hadn't cottoned on to that one until several hours later, when he caught a blurry glimpse of... _something_... hovering over Cabbie's starboard wing that vanished from his sight when he tried to look at it directly.

Blade still hadn't gotten a decent look at Cabbie's ghost, but he was beginning to see the shape of this one. The big, unexpectedly _familiar_ shape, now sliding out through the trees ringing the Lodge.

The Aero Union paintjob - red fore and aft, with narrow black stripes bordering a white middle - was as sharp now as it had been seventeen years ago, when Richter had gone down. He'd only been with Piston Peak six months, having left the bigger Aero operation for reasons that were never specified to Blade, then just another helitanker grunt on the team.

Orion P-3s were good sized planes by spec; not in the same class as DC-10s or, heaven forbid, TriStars, but Richter had taken pride in outperforming his specs in every possible direction. He'd earned his nickname from the fact he made the damn ground shake with his engine roar and his landings.

Like Cabbie, Rick was ex-military, Navy rather than Air Force. Like many of his model, he had been a marine scout, searching for and engaging enemy submarines during the Cold War. If his terrifyingly accurate aim fighting fires had been any indication, the Soviet subs he'd been pitted against hadn't stood even the barest chance. The occasional stories he'd told during his brief time with them tended to back up that conclusion.

Unlike Cabbie, Rick hadn't been faking being a grumpy, taciturn old cuss, something that seventeen years of being dead didn't seem to have changed much. The big plane's heavy roll took his transparent starboard wing right over top of Blade, Nick, and Maru, and he didn't so much as glance at them.

Blade had gotten familiar with the sharp cold of a ghost's touch in the past few months; Nick's chill had been tightly contained, only felt when he and Blade were in direct contact. Rick, by contrast, seemed to be emanating waves of arctic-level cold as he rolled by. Nick took a sharp hop backwards, bumping up against Blade's side, and Maru, usually unflappable, scooted back until he was ducking into Blade's shadow, his eyes wide and fixed on the plane.

The fact that Maru was completely able to see Richter didn't escape either Blade or Nick's notice. Rick was one of the ones that Maru had never gotten a chance to save - flying lower than he should have been, a sudden downdraft, and... well, on his bad nights, Blade still saw the wreckage in his nightmares.

Warily, Blade kept his eyes fixed on Rick as the plane rolled closer to the Lodge, inspecting the buffet tables with his characteristically disapproving gaze. None of the guests seemed particularly aware of him - a few shifted a little away from the chill he emanated, but none of them were reacting with fear. Several members of the Lodge staff, though, tensed or straightened as Rick rolled by, and one little forklift - Blade recognized him as the Concierge - actually glared directly at Richter, and then proceeded to _make shooing motions with his tines_.

"There is nothing that guy is scared of, is there?" Nick, leaning against Blade's side, was speaking at barely over a whisper, but the admiration in his voice was clear.

Maru, not-quite pressed against Blade's other side, snorted quietly. "You remember the TMST investigation, right?"

The Concierge hadn't even reached the top of the investigator's tires. That hadn't stopped him from politely interrupting the massive ARFF's interrogation of Blade and proceeding to implicate Cad Spinner in the Base's loss of water and, consequently, Dusty's crash, which was probably what had ultimately lead to Cad's demotion.

"That ARFF was one thing, but _Richter?_ "

"Between the two," Blade answered dryly, "I think I'd have taken Richter."

"Blade, on your best day you couldn't have taken Richter."

"You're hilarious, Maru. Hear me laughing?"

"Uh, guys?!"

Blade and Maru glanced up at Nick's sharp hiss, and Blade had to fight not to jump backwards in surprise. Beside him, he felt Maru give a sharp twitch, shrinking back another inch or two. Not that he blamed him; Richter was intimidating enough ignoring you from several lengths away.

He was significantly scarier when you looked up to realize that he had moved, silently, to within ten feet and was now staring _directly at you_.

"Ahh... hey, Rick. How's death been treatin' you?" Blade could hear Nick wince even as he finished the question, which was fair. While Blade didn't personally have any experience with existence on the other side, he was still reasonably certain that that was a monumentally stupid question.

If the look Richter was giving Nick was any indication, the big plane agreed.

"Great, fine, nice to see you too. Blaze, _you_ talk to him."

"Because I'm known for my scintillating conversational skills or because you don't want to keep sounding like an idiot?"

"Yes!"

"They've been doing this since _July_ ," Maru grumbled, and Richter, rather to their surprise, shot the forklift a look that bordered on _sympathetic_ before quite simply disappearing into thin air.

"What the -?!" Blade bit off the end of his own exclamation, although Maru and Nick weren't quite so conscientious, and a couple of vocab words floated up through the air before they got themselves under control.

A second later, the woods behind them erupted in screams once again, and Blade heard the sound of several engines roaring to life. Several _familiar_ engines, he realized, picking out the five distinct threads of sound, all overlapping with one another - and the continued, equally familiar, shouts and screams, all drawing closer at a rapid rate.

Sighing to himself, Blade opened a radio channel to Cabbie to request a pickup; the kids had probably had their fill of haunted trails for tonight now, and he wasn't going to make them drive back in the dark. While he was on the radio, he sent a ping to Windlifter, not particularly caring whether the Sikorsky had woken from his nap or not. This ghost situation was turning into a circus, and it was going to need a ringmaster.

Blackout was the first of the Jumpers to come hurtling out of the woods, skidding to a stop when he saw Blade, Nick and Maru all waiting for him, and nearly getting rear-ended by Drip as a result. Pinecone shot out to one side of the two boys, jamming on her brakes to avoid running headlong into Maru, and Avalanche - thankfully, moving slower than the others simply due to his sheer weight - managed to stop just outside the treeline. Dynamite, bringing up the tail to make sure her people were safe ahead of her, rolled around him and looked to Blade, wide-eyed and wordless.

Nick, his brilliant grin at the most slag-eating possible levels, chuckled at the Smokejumper's rattled expressions. "What's the matter? You all look like you've seen a ghost!"

Although he did have strenuous objections to the fact it was _pumpkin_ , Blade fully agreed with Maru that Nick deserved the pie to the face he received for the remark.

[END CHAPTER FIVE]

* * *

CH5 Notes:

*Red Bulldozer: mentioned in the movies, this is a pun/spinoff (I almost said 'takeoff', how's that for a pun?) on the Red Bull Air Race World Championship. One of United States races does take place in Las Vegas in mid-October. Some acknowledged creative liberty is taken in that I have substituted the 2015 schedule (in which the last race of the series was mid-October and in Vegas) for the correct 2014 schedule (in which Dusty would have been in Austria at the end of October for the last race).

*The Orion P-3s, introduced in 1962, are still flying in active service today. Designed for maritime patrol, they are durable, versatile craft that, on the civilian end, have been adapted for things like fighting wildfires and flying into hurricanes for weather research.

*Aero Union is a now-defunct corporation previously based in California, who specialized in firefighting aircraft. They did in fact have eight P-3s in their fleet, all of whom wore paintjobs virtually identical to the guy on The Wall. You can look them up on Google if you're interested, it has lots of pictures. My interpretation of the P-3 on The Wall is making a special request appearance. If you would like to borrow him, just ask. I promise I'm much nicer than he is.

*Yes, pumpkin-oatmeal-raisin cookies are a thing, you can Google them for recipes. I have not tried them, but will probably do so, as I do not share Blade's objection to all things pumpkin. (I swear, I had no idea he had so many damn quirks when I started writing this. He really does refuse to refer to jack-o-lanterns as anything other than 'fire hazard gourds', which is both hilarious and frustrating.)

 _* - Happy Daytona Day to any fellow NASCAR fans reading this! Heck of a finish - I was almost expecting to see a tongue get involved!_


	6. His Pie is Full of Secrets

**ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER SIX**  
His Pie Is Full of Secrets

There was, as Blade had expected, a bit of good-natured griping from Cabbie about having to drag his tails out of the hanger so late to come and retrieve his charges. However, it was a short hop between two well-lit airstrips, and he was cheerful enough when he arrived a few minutes later, greeting the Jumpers with a wry "What, all haunted out?"

The looks that the jump team had exchanged among themselves certainly tipped him off that something was amiss, and Blade watched as Cabbie made the transition from snarky old uncle to protective soldier in the blink of an eye. "What happened?"

"We all had a little run-in with an old friend," Blade answered, when the Jumpers exchanged another round of looks. "Richter decided to check in on the proceedings."

Cabbie's eyes went wide enough that he risked cracking his brow windows. "Richter? That antisocial brute turned up for a party?"

Blade and Nick nodded in unison. Maru, now sitting between the two, safely tucked under their eclipsing rotors, was chewing on the inside of his cheek, his gaze focused inward.

"Not a whole lotta ghosts his size floating around, trust me," Nick said. "And no mistaking his disposition, either." Glancing sideways, he added, "You guys are bein' awfully quiet over there. You all okay?"

The Smokejumpers were exchanging a lot of looks amongst themselves, with alarmingly little associated chatter. The last time they had been this quiet, the entire team had anxiously been awaiting Maru's verdict on Dusty's survival.

"We saw him," Pinecone finally whispered, to vigorous nods from the boys. "A big P-3, red and white, and he just _stared_ -"

"HE WAS COLD!"

"And it felt like he wanted us outta there," Dynamite added. "So we _went_."

Cabbie tilted his head at them, curious. "You mud-grubbers face down infernos capable of melting you into slag once a month, and you were that scared of Rick? Granted, he wasn't exactly nice, but..."

"HE WAS SCARY!"

"He was _terrifying!_ "

"We've never seen anything like him before," Drip said, and the others fell silent around him with surprisingly subdued nods.

Cabbie, his eyes narrowing, looked them each over in turn. "None of you can see ghosts? At all?"

Pinecone and Drip raised their respective implements, hesitantly.

"I can, a little?" Pinecone offered, her eyes flickering to the spot over Cabbie's starboard wing, where the almost ubiquitous shimmer was nearly invisible in the heat rising off the engine. "But... a white blur, or a feelin' of a presence. Never anythin' like _that_."

"Same for me," Drip added. "Our family's house is old, it's haunted, and there'd be this shimmer going back and forth in my room sometimes, but it never paid attention to me. That," he nodded forcefully towards the woods, "was seriously creepy!"

Nick, who had been glancing from the Smokejumpers, to Cabbie, to the spot over Cabbie's wing and back throughout the discussion, hopped forward with a frown. "Cabbie, how well can you actually see ghosts? I know you're aware of -"

"I usually can't see more than a blur, like the kids," Cabbie interrupted, his tone sharpening. "And yes, I'm aware of him. No, I am not discussing him. It's private."

"Maybe you think it is," Nick muttered, half under his breath, and Blade, seeing Cabbie tense, rolled forward to put himself in between the pair.

"If you two don't mind, there are already enough ghosts in the park. I'd rather not have either of you joining them." _Again_ , he didn't add to Nick, but made certain his expression conveyed.

Nick, for his part, huffed and flicked his rotors, elaborately unconcerned. "I could take him."

"Nick," Maru began, "on your best day -"

Cabbie growled in response, the sound trembling over Blade's plating with a thousand unspoken threats. Nick's rotors stiffened in indignation, and the Smokejumpers, already on edge, inched away.

"All right, knock it off!" Blade barked, startling the group into silent stillness. "Maru, find Dusty and Dipper and tell them we're leaving. I'll give you a lift back. The rest of you, try not to upset anyone liable to compact you if you piss them off."

Nick muttered something under his breath in Spanish that made Blackout choke on his own spit and Maru bark with laughter, but hopped wordlessly out of the way as Cabbie turned himself around to load the Jumpers.

When Cabbie headed for the airstrip and Maru rolled off to find Dusty, Blade turned a sharp glare on his partner. "Why, exactly, are you insisting on tweaking Cabbie's tail so much? He has a temper, which you have seen amply demonstrated in the past. And while I'm not sure what your wishes on the matter are, I would really rather not have you dead again just yet!"

"What are you - Blade, _mi amado_ , I'm not suicidal, trust me, he's just pissing me off!" The indignity in Nick's voice, as much as that rarely used endearment - my beloved - was what settled Blade's temper, even as his curiosity roused.

"Cabbie is probably the most inoffensive member of the team, Nick. If he's pissing you off, we're going to have problems, ones that I can't afford." The reasoning behind it went unspoken but understood; Blade couldn't sacrifice the team's cohesion. If Cabbie and Nick couldn't work together, some aspect of the conflict would have to be removed, and Piston Peak had been Cabbie's home longer than Blade's. If it came down to it, it would be Blade and Nick who transferred, not Cabbie.

Nick's expression told Blade that the message was understood, loud and clear. "It's not me, personally. It's what he's doing to Wally."

Blade had a brief moment of sheer bewilderment before two and two slotted together, although he thought the answer might have come out closer to thirteen than four. "Wally being Cabbie's ghost?"

Nick nodded, a sharp jerk of motion. "Yeah. You think I'm dedicated, stickin' with you for thirty years? Wally went down in nineteen fifty-four, and he's been with Cabbie ever since."

"Fifty-four?" Blade frowned, mentally shuffling through the dates of wars Cabbie would have been involved in. "The Korean war ended in fifty-three."

"Yeah, it wasn't the Koreans that got him. Wally and Cabbie were part of the black-ops group the CIA loaned out to the French during the Indochina war. They were flying in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu when Wally got tagged. He didn't make it back. Neither did another member of their wing, or the French team assigned to them."

Blade stifled his own grimace. He knew that Cabbie had seen some horrific things in war, no matter how well the old plane hid it nowadays, but having two wingmates and an assigned team shot down on a black-ops mission? That was worse than he'd expected. "You got all this from Wally?"

Another nod. "Yeah. Cabbie sure as Pits ain't talking about it, and that's what pisses me off. Wally's been with him twice as long as I've been tailing you, but Cabbie's been aware of him the whole time. And he freely acknowledges that Wally's there, but refuses to do anything else. Never talks about him, never talks to him, nothing. You've got no idea how much that hurts a guy, Blaze, to have someone you care about enough to stay on this side for just act like you're not worth their time or attention. _That's_ why he's pissing me off."

Blade frowned deeply enough that he could feel the metal between his eyebrows creasing. "That doesn't sound like Cabbie. Whatever else he may be, he isn't cruel."

"I don't like thinkin' it either, Blaze. Everything else he does tells me he's a good guy, but... tell that to Wally."

"Tell what to who?" Maru's voice was somewhat muffled - by pumpkin pie, if the scent of his breath was any indication - but the plate he was carrying had another miniature apple pie on it for Blade, and he was therefore forgiven.

What Blade was a little less willing to forgive him for, however, was the presence of the car following him.

"That's your oh-slag face," Nick whispered, trying to glance behind himself. "What's blowin' up?"

"Nothing. Yet," Blade muttered back, as Nick hopped around - and almost fell over his own skids at the sight of the dark blue Jaguar.

"Man, she does have nice lines."

"She's married, Lopez. Look but don't touch," Maru grinned, as Nick huffed, insulted, and Blade rolled his eyes.

"I _know_ that! And even if she wasn't married, I wouldn't -"

"I'm kidding, you scrap-sucker," Maru snorted, and preempted Nick's reply by stuffing a pie into his mouth.

"Watch who you're calling scrap, Maru," Blade shot back, just as Maru bit into another pie as well. The resulting half-choke, half spit-take was as hilarious as it was satisfying, even if Blade did had to roll backwards to avoid getting a spray of pumpkin crumbs on his nose.

Elizabeth, who had wisely stopped a few feet behind Maru, watched the exchange with amusement before casting a curious, thoughtful look at Nick. Although Blade liked the old Jaguar just fine, he'd been hoping to get through tonight without running into her. Aside from knowing the Air Attack team quite well, she'd also been a fan of CHoPs back in the day, and Nick's appearance was probably going to lead to some very awkward questions.

Since she was the park's Special Events Coordinator, though, and responsible for overseeing tonight's party, it had probably been a fool's hope from the beginning. Liz enjoyed her job to the hilt, and thrived on making people happy - within reason. She and Cad had rarely, if ever, seen eye to eye, and the former Superintendent had tried to have her fired more than once - including the time he'd tried to have an underling fire her for her refusal to buy fluted crystal glasses for the Lodge's reopening.

When Maru and Nick had both finished choking, she rolled the last few feet between them, parking next to Maru and helping herself to one of the pies on his plate. "Blade, it's good to see you here. And Mister Lopez," she added warmly, ignoring Nick's startled jump, "a true pleasure to see you among us this evening. I hope you've enjoyed the party?"

"Um," Nick replied eloquently, as Maru snickered his way through the rest of the pie he'd choked on. "You..."

On second thought, awkward questions might have been easier. "Let me guess," Blade sighed. "Victoria called you?"

It was times like this that Blade remembered why he usually communicated with Elizabeth over the radio or through Windlifter - her smirk was downright alarming. "It has been known to happen," she answered, the precise diction of her English accent making the sarcasm no less apparent. "She is my sister, after all."

"You don't seem all that surprised to see Nick here. What did she tell you?"

"Mostly that Windlifter called her in the middle of the night, in a tremendous rush to research resurrection rituals, and that when she jokingly asked who had come back -"

"Nick gave her his old CHoPs ID over the radio," Blade finished the thought with a sigh. "I figured she thought it was a recording."

"She did," Elizabeth smiled. "But Windlifter has been behaving oddly enough that I had a few suspicions when she spoke to me; more, when Jammer mentioned the radio conversation with you this morning. So I kept an eye out for your team tonight. Must say, I got a bit more than I was expecting."

" 'Nobody expects the -' "

"Monty Python references will result in your pie supply being terminated, Maru."

"...appearance of a formerly dead helicopter?"

"Or a dead P-3, either," she added amiably, and Blade blinked at her in surprise.

Catching the expression, she arched an eyebrow at him in response. "Blade, my husband speaks to the dead more than he does the living. It would be a very awkward marriage if I wasn't aware of our departed guests." Elizabeth paused, flicking her side mirrors and frowning. "Speaking of awkward, I believe I need to go rescue one of the servers. Enjoy the rest of your evening, boys!" The last was said with a bit of a wink, as she swung a tight turn and made her way back towards the tables.

Blade glanced ahead of her and bit down on a wince - one of the forklifts had apparently slipped while serving a guest, and was in definite need of a run through the pressure washers. Elizabeth swept in with her usual aplomb, and had the table reorganized, the guest served, and the forklift off to the wash rack in the time it took Nick to find his tongue.

"...y'know, I never met a bulldozer that looked like a Jaguar before."

Maru's bark of laughter was loud enough to draw glances from the guests around them, and Blade snorted in agreement as he helped himself to the apple pie Maru was still carrying.

Maru ignored Blade's tongue and took a swig of cider before resuming the conversation. "So, who was telling what to who a minute ago?"

"I'm airing out all of Cabbie's dirty secrets," Nick replied with grim cheer, side-eying the lattice-crusted mini-pie on Maru's plate as Blade devoured the apple. "What flavor is that?"

Maru popped the pie in question into Nick's mouth before replying, watching the helicopter's expression melt from indignation into bliss. "Razzleberry. Think of it like tutti-frutti in a crust."

Nick's moan of appreciation verged on pornographic. "Maru, anything wicked you have ever done to me, I forgive you."

Blade laughed softly despite himself as he watched Nick's eyes slide shut. His partner's love of tutti-frutti ice cream had been a running joke on the set for years, and seeing Maru both remember and acknowledge it was immensely cheering. It was good to see Maru relaxing back into the ease he and Nick had once shared; they'd been friends before Blade and Nick had ever met.

And maybe, just maybe, having Nick back was helping as much of Maru's guilt as Blade's.

Blade frowned thoughtfully, glancing towards the Lodge's runway. The noise from Cabbie's engines rose to a deafening roar as he poured power into them; the Lodge's airstrip was shorter than the Base's, and he was taking off tired and fully loaded. As he lifted off, the lights from the Lodge flashed reflections off his back and down his tails. The weld seams of the replacement patch caught the light for a split-second, throwing miniscule shadows into the stripes on Cabbie's tail, and Blade frowned.

 _Scars._

Two wingmates on a black-ops mission.

Beside Blade, Maru was bickering cheerfully with Nick, playing keep-away with the last pie - pumpkin again, dammit - the shadows not dark enough to hide the pitted marks on his tines as he dodged Nick's laughing bites.

 _Scars. Guilt._

Maybe it was more than just the Smokejumpers weighing the old warplane down.

So not only had Blade's partner returned from the dead, he now had to guide Cabbie through a sixty-year old guilt complex, all while Windlifter researched Native American resurrection rituals, to say nothing of the fact that one of the Attack team's deceased members was putting in for screentime.

Never mind a circus, this was turning into a soap opera.

"Maru," Blade called, popping his side hatch and ignoring the forklift's squawk and Nick's wordless sound of triumph. "Let's get back to Base before anything else weird happens. Or your pie-eating ability exceeds my takeoff weight."

Maru yanked his tine out of Nick's mouth, leaving the helicopter snickering and chewing on the pie. "If you were aiming to skip the weird, you should've left an hour ago."

"Or just stayed in my hanger this morning," Blade countered, dipping down on his landing gear as Maru boosted himself up, pressing his forks against Blade's interior floor to haul his front tires in. Carrying passengers was always a bizarre feeling, but he'd hauled Maru's aft around enough over the years to almost get used to it.

As a matter of fact, with Nick at his side, it felt a lot like home.

[END CHAPTER 6]

* * *

CH6 Notes:

1* First off: no, Cabbie is NOT, by any measure, a bad guy. He is not trying to be cruel. He does have the best of intentions with his treatment of Wally, and it will be explained at a later point in time.

2* I know the ingredients of razzleberry and tutti frutti are completely different, but the flavor profiles are reasonably similar. It's also another CHiPs reference, as tutti-frutti is Ponch's favorite.

3* Drip and Pinecone's ghost-seeing abilities are somewhat personally based, as is Drip's bedroom haunt. A house my family previously lived in did have a spectral resident, who would walk back and forth in my bedroom closet. Although I never saw them, the footsteps were perfectly audible.

4* French Indochina, or the Indochinese Union, formed by what is today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, was under the control of the French from the 1880s onward. Following the fall of France during WWII (1940), the Japanese assumed control of the area. The Vietnamese rebellion against Japanese control would began in 1941. Four years later, that rebellion, by then the First Indochina War, would expand against France as well. It would continue until 1954, when the Battle of Dien Bien Phu would decide the War in Vietnam's favor. The Second Indochina War, which began shortly thereafter, would become better known as the Vietnam War.

4b* The CIA did in fact secretly loan aircraft, including C-119 Boxcars, to the French in 1954 to help with the combat against Vietnam. Considering Cabbie and Avalanches's comments about classified stuff, CIA, and Black Ops during the film (which made me wonder if Avalanche doesn't know a bit more about Cabbie's history than the others), it seemed like a reasonable fit. One C-119 was lost to anti-aircraft fire during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, killing all aboard; two American pilots and the French crew. One of the pilots, Wallace 'Wally' Buford, has unknowingly contributed his name to Cabbie's ghost, which is used with the greatest respect.

5* Elizabeth is a dark blue 1970 Jaguar E-Type Series 2, and the 'old lady' Cad orders fired during the movie for not getting the crystal glasses for the Lodge's reopening. Victoria, Windlifter's source, is her older sister, a British racing green 1950 Jaguar XK120 FHC. Both of them are imports (pardon the pun) from another of my stories, which is as yet incomplete and unposted.

6* Lastly - does anyone actually read these notes? Or this story here on FFN? - I'm curious - the chapter title is, for anyone unfamiliar with the movie, a paraphrased Mean Girls reference.


	7. The First Cut is the Deepest

Warnings for this chapter: Angst, emotional upheaval from unexpected sources, very brief mention of suicidal thoughts.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER SEVEN**  
The First Cut is the Deepest

The Smokejumpers were still milling around on the taxiway when Blade and Nick landed, all of them looking more than a little spooked. Cabbie must have been moving pretty damn quick, because he'd already returned to his hanger and the door was firmly shut.

"Rough flight back?" Nick asked Dynamite, his tone apologetic, as Blade set down in front of the workshop to let Maru off.

"Cabbie's not gonna hurt us," she shot back, jabbing a tire at Nick. " _You_ , however, are pissing him off."

"Yeah? It's mutual."

"It'll be dealt with," Blade interrupted, rolling in between them and giving Nick a knock with his nose to shut him up. "Dynamite, are you and your team going to be all right after meeting Richter?"

"ARE THERE MORE GHOSTS HERE?"

Blade glanced sideways at Nick, raising an eyebrow, and Nick sighed deeply before turning his attention back to the Jumpers.

"You want an honest answer, or a nice, reassuring lie?"

That prompted another round of glances among them, before Dynamite finally set her jaw. "Honest. It's not gonna do us any good if you lie and somebody we used to know wakes us up tonight anyway."

"Smart girl," Nick smiled. "First off, the ghosts here aren't gonna hurt you. The worst they're gonna do is give you a chill. Let that sink in first."

All five of them nodded, resembling nothing so much as a collection of life-sized bobble-heads, and Blade had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing. Suppressing his mirth was made a little easier when he picked apart Nick's phrasing; the ghosts _here_.

He made a mental note to ask later just how dangerous a ghost like Richter could be.

"Got it? Okay, yes, there are ghosts here on the Base, three of 'em if you're not countin' me. Cabbie's you're aware of. His name is Wally, and he was a C-119 who got shot down in fifty-four. Cabbie won't tell you about the mission, but you can look up."

That prompted a few murmurs from the Smokejumpers, and a thoughtful nod from Avalanche. The whole team had a habit of poking at Cabbie for stories when they thought they could get away with it, and Blade suspected Avalanche, whose taste in reading ran towards war histories, had put together a few things about Cabbie's past that the warplane might have deliberately not mentioned. Giving any of the team, particularly Avalanche, clues to research behind Cabbie's back would either end with the most informative storytime the Jumpers had ever had, or Cabbie burying their bodies in the woods. Blade wasn't sure which option had a better chance this week, particularly if Nick kept aggravating him.

"Second ghost is a gal named Daisy. She's a purple Cessna, and she spends her time at the other end of the Base, so you don't have to worry about her."

That one, Blade knew. She'd been a guest here at the park, who'd either misheard or ignored orders during a fire evacuation. She'd been blinded by the drifting smoke of the fire and crashed as a result, about a hundred feet directly below the end of the Base's runway. According to Nick, she'd been hanging around the Base ever since, although she was shy enough to rarely be seen.

"She's the one who crashed into the cliff, right? About fifteen years ago?" That was Drip, peering towards Blade's end of the runway like he was hoping to catch a glimpse of their late resident.

Blade glanced around, curious. The Cessna was there, and had made her way to within earshot of the group, but was staying at a respectful distance, close to Windlifter's hanger. When Blade met her eyes, she jerked back, clearly startled, and disappeared, reappearing a moment later at the far end of the runway, half-hiding behind Dusty's hanger. Blade let his gaze slide off her, looking up to the lights on the landing pad in front of his hanger. One of the bulbs was starting to flicker; he'd need to let Maru know it would need replacement.

"Yeah, the same. She's real shy. If you see her, count yourself lucky. I think Dusty's the only one here she's ever spoken to aside from Windlifter."

That part, Blade hadn't known. Idly, he wondered if Dipper had a rival as Dusty's most persistent fan, or if it was merely proximity. Then again, she'd never spoken to him...

"The other ghost is one of yours, a Smokejumper. He's in your hanger." Nick paused for the exclamations to die down, then continued. "I don't know the name, he's a halvsie."

"A what now?"

"Sorry. Halvsie's what I call ghosts that are only half here. See, ghosts like me and Daisy and Rick, when we're here, we're _all_ here. That's why we show up clearly, can talk to people, all the good stuff. Ghosts like Wally and your buddy, they're only half present. Maybe they started to cross over and decided to come back and've got one tire on the other side, maybe they're trying to haunt two places at once, I don't know. But they're mostly just visible as shimmers or white lights. They're a lot harder to talk to. Sometimes you're not aware of them at all, unless you're a ghost yourself or have Windlifter-level ghost-talking mojo."

"I do not think I want his mojo," Blackout announced, to a general consensus.

"There are some days I'm not sure Windlifter wants his mojo, either," Nick muttered, quietly enough that only Blade heard him, his eyes instinctively flicking across the airstrip to the hangers.

Like Cabbie, Windlifter had his hanger closed up tight - unusual for the Sikorsky, who generally left his doors open for the airflow. Despite that, Blade could still catch the high-low throb of music from inside; AC/DC if the sharpness of the highs was any indication. The choice of music in and of itself didn't mean anything, but the volume suggested both stress and annoyance.

Gee, what a surprise.

"I'm not sure how realizing ghosts are real comes as such a shock to the lot of you," Blade remarked, thinking aloud more than addressing the Smokejumpers still huddled anxiously in front of them. "Since Nick _did_ appear in the middle of your hanger."

"Trust me, you weren't the only one that lost sleep last night," Dynamite answered, then snapped her mouth shut, looking startled by her own boldness. Pinecone gave a soft moan of embarrassment, hiding her face behind her rake again, while the boys exchanged snickers and nudges. Dynamite kicked out with one back tire, catching Drip, who had the misfortune of being closest, and the lot of them quieted. "Besides," she continued, "Nick was... well, as much CHoPs as we watch, he seemed pretty alive to us. I mean, we _knew_ he was dead, but we kinda felt like he was an old friend anyway."

Nick was beaming at them, obviously touched, and Blade had to fight down his own smile. "So it was less alarming to have a television character from three decades ago drop into your midst than a former member of the team just looking at you?"

"YES!"

Dynamite waved a tire at Avalanche in agreement. "None of us knew Richter, Blade, he went down before any of us got here. Not to mention he's..."

"TERRIFYING!"

"Scary!"

"Very intimidating."

"All a' the above," Pinecone added, finally lowering her rake enough to peer over the top of it.

Whereas Nick's persona on CHoPs, not that far different from his real personality, had been composed mostly of flirtatious, good-natured cheer. Admittedly, his hot temper had featured prominently in the first few seasons, but it had never distracted from the fact that Nick was a genuinely kind and caring individual.

"So basically, you just aren't scared of me, is that it?"

A few of the Jumpers squelched nervous giggles at the mock scowl on Nick's face, and Pinecone ducked behind her claw again.

"YOU'RE ONLY MEAN TO BAD GUYS!" Avalanche, his grin just as broad as Nick's ever was, laughed and dodged away as Nick hopped towards him, snapping his teeth playfully towards the dozer's blade.

"Mean?! I can be mean! I can out-mean Blaze any day of the week!" Not even bothering to dial back his laughter, Nick lunged at Avalanche again, who shrieked in mock alarm and rolled backwards.

And they were off, the Jumpers scattering in five different directions, laughing their canopies off, while Nick kicked up his engine and took off after them, his skids barely a foot off the airstrip. It evolved - or devolved, Blade wasn't exactly sure - into a game of tag in short order, the echoing shrieks of laughter enough to draw Patch and Maru out to watch, followed in short order by Cabbie, with Windlifter poking his nose out a few minutes later. By the time Patch and Maru had rolled forward to join the game, Cabbie and Windlifter had emerged entirely and parked themselves on the edge of the runway to watch the night's entertainment.

Blade escaped to the area of relative safety near the hangers when he could see Nick thinking of tagging him into the game as well, and settled himself down between the two largest members of his team, feeling comfortably safe between the bulk of their frames.

"I'll want a word with both of you tomorrow," he said softly, watching as Dynamite smacked Nick in the skid with a tire and took off again, as Nick, laughing, glided slowly backwards above the concrete.

On his left, Cabbie heaved a sigh. "I thought you might."

Windlifter, to his right, remained still and silent, but conveyed resigned acceptance all the same.

Tomorrow, Blade would talk to them both; Cabbie about his single, loyal ghost, and Windlifter about the rest. He didn't anticipate either conversation being easy, but both of them were necessary.

Tonight, however, there would be nothing but clear skies and laughter, and he intended to enjoy every minute of it.

* * *

Considering how late Halloween had run, the morning of November first rolled around a lot earlier than Blade would have preferred, particularly since he'd apparently exhausted his quota of sleeping past dawn, possibly for the _next_ three decades.

Nick was still sound asleep against his side, rotor blades resting over Blade's roof, and Blade's port rear tire had actually gotten hooked over Nick's skid sometime during the night.

They'd always slept close back then, when they had the chance - the public fiction had to be maintained, which included separate apartments - but never like this, so close it would take a paint buffer to get them off one another.

But back then, they were young and stupid, and thought they were invincible. Neither of them was dealing with the creeping fear that Nick would vanish if either of them said the wrong word, somehow broke whatever inconceivable magic was holding him here.

Very carefully, Blade disentangled himself from Nick without disturbing the smaller chopper, inching sideways until he was out from under Nick's rotors. Nick stirred but didn't wake, murmuring in his sleep and hunkering a little further down on his skids, looking adorably innocent.

Blade suppressed a snort only with significant effort. Nick was many things, but innocent was not one of them. The side of Blade's tongue was raw with how much he'd bitten it last night, trying not to embarrass himself once he and Nick had shut the door. Or, more accurately, embarrass _Dusty_ , whose hanger was closest to Blade's, and would be the one most bothered by hearing Blade's endorsement of Nick's skills.

Very carefully, Blade nudged the door of the hanger open, grateful that it slid quietly on its track. Outside, dawn was just breaking over the eastern ridge, and he could see the Peak silhouetted against the rising sun. The air was cool, but dryer than yesterday, and there was a breeze coming up from the valley, which would dry the forest more quickly.

Back on duty, then. Blade took a moment to stretch up on his landing gear, giving his rotors a slow turn as he worked out the lingering stiffness of a late night and an early morning, enjoying the feeling of the sunlight, before heading for the main hanger to start the coffee brewing.

It would _not_ be pumpkin spice this morning.

* * *

Maru rolled in while Blade was downing the first cup out of the fresh pot - brewer's privilege - looking like he hadn't slept well. Blade poured him a cup without a word, and waited patiently while the forklift downed it, black and scalding. It wasn't to the burnt-oil consistency that Maru's brewing frequently produced, although that didn't seem to bother him in the least, since he promptly held the cup back out for a refill.

Nick was the next one to show, greeting Blade with a gentle nuzzle and Maru with a nose-bump to the side that earned him a retaliatory swat and a shaky grin. Nick's return smile was infectious in its brilliance, and Blade found himself smiling widely enough that Cabbie rolled in, took one look at him, and nearly rolled straight back out again, although the lure of properly brewed coffee proved too strong to resist. The warplane's eyes were half-lidded and tight at the corners, with either exhaustion or pain, Blade couldn't be sure of which just yet. Windlifter came in not long after Cabbie, yawning widely enough to swallow Dynamite whole, and mumbled something about dancing birds, which could have been part of a legend, a prediction for the day's weather, or just Windlifter being confusing.

The biggest, and most interesting, development of the morning came just a few minute later, and from a completely unexpected source; the NASA Space Weather Bureau, courtesy of Patch. She rolled in to the main hanger only a few minutes behind Windlifter and slapped a sheaf of paper on the table with a triumphant sound.

It earned her a few glares, since few of the team were really morning people by nature, and none of them were after last night. Blade, the most awake only by virtue of having had first crack at the coffeepot, stared at the printed image on top of the papers. It was in black-and-white and badly pixilated, and he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"What're those, satellite images?" Nick asked, tilting sideways until he was almost up on one skid and peering down at the picture, as if that would help him interpret it better. Blade tipped his own head slightly and squinted, trying to make sense of the image, a rough half-sphere of mottled whites and greys against the black background.

"Yep. The explanation for a chunk of our current problems, too." Tapping the image with one tine, Patch glanced up at them with a grin. "Solar flares."

"Solar flares?" Cabbie repeated, looking up from his own coffee. "That would account for the weird resonances on the ground. And all the radio interference we're still getting."

"Also the increased ghost activity, if what I've been studying is right," Patch answered, shuffling the papers to pull out several pages of text before glancing towards Windlifter. "Apparently, ghosts are strengthened by high levels of electromagnetic activity, which would include strong thunderstorms - and the geomagnetic disruptions caused by CMEs."

She glanced between Nick and Windlifter for confirmation, earning a startled look from the former and a thoughtful nod from the latter.

Maru, tines wrapped around his third cup of coffee in an expression of sheer desperation, blinked slowly across the table at Patch. "In English?"

Blade, who could judge how well Maru had slept by the state of his eyes, guessed the forklift hadn't gotten more than an hour or two of rest. Not that anyone had gotten much; Dusty and Dipper had remained at the party for the sake of politeness - Dusty - and stalking purposes - Dipper - until well past midnight. Neither they, nor the Smokejumpers, whose hanger lights had still been on when Dusty and Dipper arrived back at base, had arrived for breakfast yet.

"CME stands for Coronal Mass Ejection. Particles ejected from the surface of the sun during solar disruptions cause compression of the Earth's magnetosphere -"

"In _simple_ English?"

"The sun spits out a bunch of stuff that screws up the Earth's magnetic field," Nick volunteered absently, hopping around the table to get a better look at the photographs and charts Patch was laying out. "How bad is this looking, Patch?"

"Bad enough. We're still in the leading edge of the magnetic interference from this ejection, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. The predictions aren't clear yet, but it might escalate to disrupting radio transmissions completely for a day or two. Can't say what it'll do for the ghosts, though. Or us," she added, glancing across the table at Cabbie. "Are you still getting those headaches?"

"Oh, yeah. Getting worse, too."

"Magnetic sensitivity headaches?" Blade eyed the big warplane for a moment. He was familiar enough with them, though not personally. Some airframes, mostly those with military lines, tended to be more highly attuned to fluctuations in atmospheric conditions, which included magnetic fields and barometric pressure, and abrupt or extreme changes could induce migraines in the more sensitive.

"Pretty common for fixed-wings," Maru spoke up, although he was speaking into his coffee cup with his eyes half-closed, his expression one of thoughtful exhaustion. "Betcha that's part of why Dusty and Dipper aren't up yet. Windlifter's got one too, though."

Several pairs of eyes shifted to the Sikorsky, who gave his rotors an uncomfortable twitch in response before nodding slightly. "It will not affect my work."

"If this is gonna get worse, mine will," Cabbie sighed. "There was a geo-mag storm in March of '89 that grounded me for three days because I was seeing double."

"Not exactly ideal for firefighting," Maru spoke up wryly. "I'll see if I can find you an analgesic for the moment. If it gets too bad, anything I'd give you would ground you anyway."

Nick was staring across the table at Cabbie with narrowed eyes, his gaze focused, for once, on the plane rather than the pale shimmer over his starboard engine. "If you're that sensitive to mag-fluxes, how did you not catch on that this was a solar storm? They've got a pretty unique resonance, don't they?"

Cabbie's responding look was withering. "Because," the plane answered, biting the word off with sharp deliberation, "sometimes I get tension headaches, too. And you are making me tense."

"Hey, it ain't my fault you're being a complete slag-aft about Wally."

"Wally is none of your damned business, and I'll thank you to keep your nose out of it." The growl in Cabbie's voice carried an uncountable number of unspoken threats. Any sensible vehicle would have backed down from that tone, especially coming from a warplane who tipped the scales at over twenty tons.

Nick, all fifteen hundred pounds of him, stiffened his rotors and glared back, utterly defiant, his voice dropping into a growl that nearly matched Cabbie's own. "It _is_ my damned business, because you know who Wally comes cryin' to while you're too busy pretending he doesn't exist? _Me!_ I've been dealin' with your emotional crap for years now, because _he_ made it my business, and _he's_ the one hurtin' here!"

"And if he'd just move on, he wouldn't _be_ hurting!" Cabbie bellowed back. "I'm not worth him staying here for! It's my fault he went down, the least I should do is see him over!"

The silence that followed that statement was echoing. Nick, shocked speechless, was left with his mouth open, staring across the table. Maru and Patch were looking at Cabbie as though they'd never seen him before, and Windlifter was staring intently at the blur over Cabbie's wing, looking nearly as startled as the rest of them. Blade, for his part, felt very nearly as astonished as Nick looked.

"What do you mean, your fault?" Dusty's soft voice, slipping into the ringing silence of the hanger from the open door, startled everyone; Maru cursed as he dropped his cup, splashing coffee across the floor, and Patch followed that with a louder and even more vicious epithet after her own jump sent several of her papers fluttering into the spill.

Dipper peered in, tentatively, over Dusty's wing, and Blade could see the shadows of the Smokejumpers lurking conspicuously just beyond the door. This was most definitely not how he'd planned his talk with Cabbie to go - wounds like this had no business being hashed out in public.

The shimmer over Cabbie's wing brightened momentarily, and a thin tendril of energy snapped out like a whip, slapping the top of Cabbie's head. The warplane's indignant yelp broke some of the brittle tension in the air, and Dynamite and Avalanche peered worriedly around the edge of the door.

"He says it was not your fault," Windlifter offered, and the shimmer flickered brightly in response.

"Of course it was my - if we hadn't switched places, _I_ would have been the one hit," Cabbie snapped. Several sharp intakes of breath from the doorway - the Smokejumpers and Dipper - left the big plane sighing. "I asked him to switch places with me because I'd had a disagreement with the French plane who was supposed to be on my starboard flank. Wally and I traded positions, and he went down in pieces. That's not the kind of thing you forgive yourself for."

The shimmer pulsed this time, brighter and sharper, and Windlifter raised his eyebrows. "He says you are an idiot."

"I can hear him just fine, Windlifter," Cabbie growled, all of his flaps up and his propellers twitching. They were about thirty seconds from getting a very clear demonstration of the big plane's temper; Patch and Maru, the smallest of their crew, were already edging out of the line of proverbial fire. Blade felt himself rolling backwards out of sheer instinct, and locked his wheels. He'd faced Cabbie down before.

Wally's shimmer pulsed fiercely, the words beyond Blade's hearing but the emphasis clear, and Cabbie jolted sharply, his expression at what he heard verging on horror-struck, and his flaps all but snapping back down. Nick exhaled a slow hiss through his teeth, and Windlifter frowned.

"All these years you've been comin' to me," Nick sighed, his eyes fixed on the defiantly bright shimmer. "You shoulda been going to Blade all along. He'd've understood you better."

"Understood what?" Blade asked, his voice carefully quiet in the tense air.

" 'If you give up today, think of all the lives you won't save tomorrow'," Nick's voice was soft and precise as he turned to fix his eyes on Blade. "You remember the first time you heard that, Blaze?"

Blade froze in shock, distantly aware of Maru doing the same. "You were there?" he asked, hearing his voice nearly breaking on the words. "You saw -"

Nick's gaze didn't shift from him. "The second I died, I was were I belonged - next to my partner. I haven't left."

Blade swallowed sharply. The memories of that day, and the night that followed, had never left him, even with Nick's return. Staring down at the blackened street below from the top of the same building Nick had struck. Spooling up his rotors with every intention of cutting them out as soon as he cleared the building, of joining Nick. Maru, arguing him back to his senses with those words, which he'd repeated countless times over the years to trainees, and to himself. Those words that had become his mantra.

The words that reminded him, every day, that Maru - and, he now knew, Nick - had never given up on him, even at his lowest.

"I'm sorry, Nick."

"You're forgiven, baby. That's what love is, after all - you forgive, and you don't give up."

Wally gave a flash and a series of bright flickers, which Nick snorted at. " _I'm_ a sap? That's rich comin' from you, old man. At least mine isn't one-sided."

Cabbie gave a vicious snarl, turning around with little enough regard for the rest of the hanger's occupants that Blade ducked sharply and Windlifter had to roll backwards out of the way, and rolled out the door without a word. Dusty, Dipper, and the Smokejumpers, still hesitating outside the door, scattered to let him pass, wide-eyed and wary. A moment later, the sound of his hanger door slamming shut echoed across the base.

For the first time in memory, though, Wally stayed behind, a bright shimmer in the air, emitting a sad, slow pulse of light. At the edge of his hearing, like a radio transmission on the very limit of its range, Blade heard a voice sigh softly.

 _"Like you said, Nick. Love doesn't give up."_

"I know what I said, Wally," Nick sighed, slowly making his way back around the table to Blade's side. "But there's love, and then there's lost causes. Sixty years is a long time to hold out hope, my friend."

 _"Yeah, well, love makes us stupid, doesn't it?"_ Wally gave one more bright flicker, the rhythm of the light matching the cadence of his wry chuckle, and blinked out.

"Um."

Blade glanced back towards the door. Dusty was poking his nose in, looking distinctly rattled, and Blade spared a second to wonder if the racer was starting to hear Wally, too. "What is it, Champ?"

Dusty opened and closed his mouth about four times without actually forming words, then silently shook his head and rolled in, trailed by a worried-looking Dipper and the clearly shaken Smokejumpers. He understood the expressions; Cabbie was as solid and steady as they came, and for him to have this much emotional upheaval surrounding him verged on unthinkable.

Time for a command decision. "All right, everybody listen up. Cabbie doesn't need his rusty plating aired for all of us. If he or Wally come to you, listen politely, tell them whatever you think is best, and that's it. If they don't come to you, you aren't involved, and leave it at that. Understood?"

The chorus of responses that rose was too disjointed to pick out more than Dynamite's 'sir, yes sir!' and Avalanche's 'GOT IT!', but the fervent nods didn't require any translation.

"Right," Nick muttered, glancing at the coffee-stained heap of papers on the table in front of Patch. "So other than the sun behaving badly, what're we looking at today?"

Windlifter's eyes suddenly widened, shooting a glance towards the still-open door, and Blade knew from his expression even before Patch's radio crackled.

"Trouble."

"Windlifter, Champ, Dipper, load up," Blade ordered, all of them scrambling for the retardant tanks as Patch bolted for the Tower. "Smokejumpers, hold in reserve. I don't want Cabbie off the ground unless it's necessary at the moment. We'll scout on our initial run and call if we need you. Nick -"

"Like Pits am I staying here, Blade," Nick snapped, even as the siren blared over the Base. "I ain't certified, but I went through all the same training you did, and I'm an extra pair of eyes."

Blade's mouth tightened minutely as he parked for his retardant fill, waiting impatiently as Maru attached the hose. "I know that, Nick."

"Good, then stop bein' a moron," Nick answered, his rotors already starting to turn. "Patch!" he bellowed towards the Tower. "Where are we headed?"

The loudspeaker hissed to life almost instantly. _"Fire is reported on the southwest ridge below La Parrilla. A campfire sparked it off a few minutes ago, under an acre currently engaged and a moderate rate of spread."_

"Let's hope it's as easy as it sounds," Blade grumbled, kicking up his engines impatiently. He was already six inches clear of the ground before Maru got the filler hose off of him, and started southward without a single backwards glance.

"Oh, yeah, we're all just in spectacular moods today, aren't we," Nick muttered, flicking impatiently through radio channels until he reached the Base's. "Radio check, Patch."

 _*Loud and clear, Nick. Have fun out there.*_

"Honey, you know Blaze has always been my definition of a good time," Nick grimaced, putting power to his rotors and heading for the open air.

END CHAPTER 7

* * *

Notes: CH7 Notes:

* In the early seasons of CHiPs, the basis of Jon and Ponch being partners (as motorcycle patrolmen generally rode singly, not in pairs) was that Ponch's impulsive behavior and hot temper kept getting him into trouble, to the point that he was put on probation. Jon was partnered with him to keep him out of trouble... although watching the show, you'd be hard-pressed to say it worked!

* Cabbie's magnetic sensitivity headaches actually have a basis in fact. Some humans (myself and my mother included) are unusually sensitive to barometric pressure fluctuations, and will, depending on the severity of the pressure change, get headaches or migraines from low-pressure systems moving in and through.

* All fifteen hundred pounds of Nick - General consensus (by which I mean three people have said 'Yeah, maybe?') is that Nick's primary model is a Hughes MD369, which weighs just over 1,100lbs. I took a swing in the dark at the rest of his genetic background and am calling him 3/4 Hughes and 1/4 MBB Bo 105; the latter is the first model of helicopter that was able to perform loops, due to, among other things, a rotor system that was revolutionary at the time of introduction. Although not much larger than the 369, the 105 is significantly heavier, clocking in at over 2,800lbs. Nick's 1,500lb weight still means he's a featherweight in the context of the universe - for perspective, Blade's about 8,000lbs, and current NASCAR racecars weigh, by rule, 3,300lbs including the driver. This means _Lightning McQueen_ is probably more than double Nick's weight.

* Via Wikipedia, a spec C-119 Boxcar tips the scales at a precise 40,000lbs when empty. Cabbie, given that the Smokejumpers are far beyond a spec C-119's ability to lift, is probably heavier than that.

* Also, I will reiterate from the previous chapter's notes: Cabbie is not a bad guy. Nor is Wally as stupid as Nick thinks he is.

* Chapter title is from the Sheryl Crow song of the same name.


	8. This One Goes Out To the One I Love

A warning for this chapter: Cabbie and Blade have a chat. It includes references to/discussion of historical societal homophobia and policies regarding the same, discussion of survivor's guilt, mentions of suicidal intentions, mentions of PTSD, and Cabbie briefly mentions making kills during wartime. Most of this has been covered already in the story, but will be addressed in a slightly more intense fashion in this chapter. Basically, much angst and many feels.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER EIGHT**  
This One Goes Out To The One I Love

The fire was, against all expectations, precisely as easy at it sounded. The cluster of cars that had started the fire had radioed quickly when a sudden wind gust had sparked their campfire out of control, despite their best efforts at constructing it safely. Dusty and Dipper had extinguished it in two passes apiece, while Windlifter and Nick, the latter staying high enough that his CHoPs paintjob wouldn't be recognized, checked the area for any stray embers.

There were none to be found, and, not two hours after setting out, Blade radioed back to the Base to inform Patch of their imminent return.

 _*Glad to hear it, Boss,*_ she answered, and Blade cocked an eyebrow at the barely-repressed laughter in her voice.

"Have I missed something?" he asked, a little wary. He still wasn't entirely sure what Maru had been planning to do with the glitter.

 _*Windlifter's delivery came.*_

"The histories his contact promised him? That was quick."

 _*Especially considerin',*_ Patch answered, the laughter in her voice slightly less repressed now.

Confused, Blade tipped enough to shoot a glance at Windlifter, who was still sitting in a holding position outside of Dusty and Dipper's orbits. The Sikorsky was definitely tapped into the conversation, but the miniscule hint of perplexity on his face didn't offer any clues as to what about the delivery was so entertaining their dispatcher.

* * *

What was entertaining Patch about the delivery became immediately obvious upon their return to the Base; seventeen large file boxes had been deposited on the concrete in front of the workshop. Upon investigation, each of the boxes proved to contain six three-inch binders apiece, all stuffed to capacity. Windlifter's contact had apparently included not just the narratives on resurrection rituals from the Cherokee, Windlifter's tribe, but _every_ tribe that had archived records of the subject.

Windlifter took one look at the delivery and uttered a word Blade hadn't been aware the big Sikorsky even _knew_. To be fair, Blade himself had a similar, albeit unvoiced, reaction when he saw the size of the delivery; he'd been hoping for a simple and clear-cut answer. Nick, by contrast, dissolved into laughter.

"Wow. Wow wow _wow_. Are you gonna need help with those?" Dipper asked, peering at the boxes from over Dusty's wing.

Windlifter heaved a sigh deep enough to make his rotor blades tremble. "These are the words and rituals of my people, whether they are my tribe or no. I cannot ask for your help in this."

"But if I'm offering -"

"Thank you, Dipper," he replied, voice firm, and she nodded cheerfully in understanding.

"Coffee, then?"

"That," Windlifter replied, eyeing the towering stacks of boxes, "would be most appreciated."

"Coming right up. I'll get one for you too, Dustykins!" she chirped, rolling cheerfully away. Dusty twitched, wordlessly, and Nick took one look at him and his laughter degenerated into breathless gasps of hilarity.

"What? What's so funny?!"

"Your - face!" Nick managed, between giggles, and Blade glanced at Dusty's expression; three parts skeeved out, one part resigned, and one rapidly increasing part bewildered.

"It isn't any funnier than usual," Blade drawled, his tone dry enough to set Nick off even more, and even Dusty's indignant 'hey!' was half snicker. Nick's laughter was more contagious than any disease ever known, and occasionally just as incapacitating. There had been more than one afternoon on set where they'd lost an hour of filming because he'd given the whole crew a case of the giggles that _would not quit_.

Blade could feel the corners of his own mouth twitching up and a snicker building in his throat, and even Windlifter was looking like he was having trouble maintaining a straight face.

Really, Maru rolling out of the workshop a second later, side-eyeing them all, and asking warily "Did I miss something?" was the absolute last straw after the stresses of the last thirty-six hours. All of them lost it; Nick's laughter was utterly breathless by now, more gasps than anything, and Windlifter's soft chuffs were almost lost beneath it, never mind Dusty's nervous chuckle and Blade's own ringing laughter.

Maru, for his part, stared at them with wide eyes before rolling slowly backwards and back into the shop, and all of them were still laughing when Dipper returned with the coffee.

* * *

It took a while for everyone to settle down; the noise had, naturally, attracted the Smokejumpers, whose laughter was nearly as contagious as Nick's. By the time everyone's hysteria had settled into sporadic chuckles and breathless whimpers of laughter, most of the team - the exceptions being Patch and Cabbie - had gathered in front of the workshop.

"Damn, I needed that." Dabbing at his eyes with a shop rag, Maru grinned around at the loose cluster of vehicles. Drip and Blackout giggled weakly in agreement, sparking off another snort of laughter from Nick, but everyone was drained enough from their half-hysterical laughter that it didn't raise more than a few weak chuckles.

"I can't remember the last time I laughed like that," Dipper added; she was still grinning, bouncing a little on her tires, energized by the laughter, rather than the pleasant lassitude Blade could feel seeping through his frame.

Nick was pressed close enough against Blade's side that he could feel the smaller chopper hum thoughtfully in agreement, leaning a little more heavily against him. Unlike Dipper, Blade could remember the last time he'd laughed like that - more than three decades ago, on a too-hot Hollywood afternoon, on a day that had proved a complete waste for filming due to the presence of far too many water balloons and Nick's contagious laughter.

Nick had crashed less than two weeks later, and Blade had more or less forgotten how to laugh for a good thirty years.

In the here and now, Blade contented himself with a small smile, leaning back against Nick's solid weight. Off to one side, the Smokejumpers were chatting quietly with Windlifter about where to move the file boxes to, Dusty was quietly sipping the now-cool coffee Dipper had brought him, and Maru...

Maru was watching Blade and Nick with an expression that said he remembered the last time Blade had laughed like that, too, and for a moment, the mingled sadness and pride in his eyes was too much to bear.

Still pressed against his side, Blade felt Nick shift slightly; presumably pulling a face at Maru, if the broad grin that spread across the forklift's face was any indication. For the first time, the sight of that missing tooth didn't result in the familiar twinge of pain and guilt for Blade; he'd been the one that knocked it out, all those years ago.

Maybe, just maybe, they were all finally healing.

* * *

Windlifter and the Smokejumpers were the first to roll off, busying themselves with getting the huge stack of file boxes away from Maru's front door and into Windlifter's hanger. Dusty and Dipper volunteered for patrol shortly thereafter, leaving Blade and Nick momentarily at loose ends.

While on another day their trains of thought might have been bound for pleasurable stations, Blade could still feel the nagging guilt of Cabbie's slammed door from earlier, and Nick could apparently feel the concern radiating through Blade's plating where their sides pressed together.

"You'd better go talk to him," Nick murmured, watching Avalanche trying to balance one of the file boxes on his blade for the trip across to Windlifter's hanger. It was a bit precarious, for more reasons than one; Avalanche's blade was meant for scraping, not carrying, and the angle at which he was holding it to keep the box even remotely stable meant that his line of vision was almost entirely blocked. More alarmingly still, Drip was the one giving him directions.

"I'm guessing you mean Cabbie, and not Avalanche," Blade murmured back, watching as Drip directed Avalanche squarely into Blackout's rear bumper. Pinecone managed to grab the box before it could fall, and carried it the rest of the distance to Windlifter's hanger, rolling her eyes as the boys started brawling behind her.

"Avalanche is dealin' with this a lot better than Cabbie is," Nick pointed out, watching as the Smokejumper in question bodily shoved Drip across the tarmac in retaliation. "Admittedly, I'm not exactly helping the Cabbie thing..."

"Am I supposed to argue with that?" Blade snarked as Nick's sentence trailed off. "Because you know what they say about good intentions and well-paved roads."

"Yep. Still the charmer I fell in love with," Nick sighed, his grin both amused and contrite. He didn't argue Blade's assessment of the situation, though, which meant he probably agreed with it.

Blade, for his part, leaned a little more heavily against his partner for a moment, a silent acknowledgement and return of the words, before straightening up and heading for Cabbie's hanger.

* * *

Blade tapped lightly at Cabbie's door with the tip of one rotor blade, listening carefully as he did so. There was no sound of movement from within, just a muffled grunt in response to his knock.

"Cabbie. May I come in?"

Heavily muffled through the door, the mutter of 'your Base,' lost none of its acidity.

It was probably the best he was going to get, Blade realized, rolling the door open with a sharp shove of his nose. Cabbie had his tails more-or-less to the door, and winced sharply when the light spilled across the hanger to strike his face. Blade rolled in and quickly bumped the door shut again.

There were a thousand different ways this conversation could go. Most of them, he realized, eyeing Cabbie's posture, wing flaps partially raised and propellers trembling with tension, would be 'badly'. The big plane was still radiating defensive anger, despite the fact he'd parked with his nose to the back wall, as far into the corner as his wings would allow. If there was clearer body language for 'leave me the slag alone,' Blade had yet to see it.

But regardless of how much they both probably wanted to ignore this problem into nonexistence, that would be pretty much the worst thing they could do. Sighing, Blade decided to go in nose-first. "Wally said he'd have crashed himself if you had died, didn't he?"

For a second, Cabbie froze, utterly still and silent, before his flaps lowered ever-so-slightly out of their defensive flare and he inched his nose around, regarding Blade out of the corner of his eye. "What makes you ask that?"

"Because that's what I tried to do, after Nick died." The words burned coming up, bitter as battery acid and choking as ash. It was the first time he'd made that admission, to anyone. He'd never known relief could feel so caustic.

The silence in the wake of his admission echoed. Cabbie's gaze shifted away from him, moving back towards the wall in front of the big plane's nose. No, not the wall - the display cases on it - Cabbie's medals.

There were two cases on the wall, the lower one containing over a dozen ribbons and awards, the glass over them immaculate and shining even in the low light.

The upper case had a thin film of dust on the glass, just enough to dull the gleam of the three medals inside and blur the old photograph pinned to the black felt beneath them. That was the case Cabbie's gaze was fixed on.

Blade eyed the case for a moment, studying the medals in it. The Purple Core on the right was no surprise, given Cabbie's scar. The Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross, though... Those were high honors, higher than any in the box below, and yet those were the ones hidden behind the dust.

"If Wally's been tattling to Nick, I imagine you know how he went down," Cabbie said, after a long moment. His voice was raspy with something Blade didn't dare put a name to.

"The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, yes."

His mouth tightening to a grim line, Cabbie nodded towards the dusty display box of medals on the wall. "He got blown out of the sky right next to me. A piece of him almost tore off my tail, that's how close together we were flying. How close we _always_ flew. We'd gone through Basic together. The whole damn war, I don't think we were ever more than ten body-lengths apart. And then, in a split second, it's just me. And all I could do was try to kill as many of them as I could get my guns on. In the end, that made me worse than them."

Cabbie's sigh blew a thin cloud of dust free of the glass, just enough for Blade to get a look at the picture; two C-119s, both of them young and grinning, their USAF paint still fresh on their flanks.

"After I made it back, they patched me back together and stuck medals to me, told me I wasn't going crazy when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, that it was just shell-shock and _guilt_." The last word was spat out, bitter and angry. "They never knew. I didn't tell them, even being - it was still illegal back then, dishonorable discharge if you were lucky. If you had a unit that wasn't very tolerant - well, there was always the excuse of friendly fire."

Cabbie paused, drawing in a painful-sounding breath, his eyes still fixed on the old photo. "It wouldn't have mattered much to me, a discharge, but Wally... the service was all he had. He'd gone from an orphanage straight to the recruiting office. And he was smart enough, dedicated enough, he could've made a lifetime of it, up through the ranks. I wanted to make sure he had that chance."

Blade nodded, silently. Over the top of Cabbie's fuselage, he could see a flicker of Wally's shimmer, back in place over Cabbie's starboard engine, and wondered about the dedication it took to stay by someone's side for sixty years.

"He told me he was willing to risk it," Cabbie sighed. "And I told him I wasn't worth the risk."

Nick and Blade had had the same conversation, almost word-for-word, more times than Blade could count. The crew had known, of course, and accepted it with the eyerolling tolerance of people long accustomed to far greater eccentricities. But if the general public had found out, it would have spelled a fast and potentially permanent end to both of their careers.

It wasn't on the level of what Cabbie would have faced, but it was still enough for Blade to nod in understanding. "If I knew how to replicate Nick's resurrection, I would do everything I could to give you back that chance, Cabbie. Whatever else you've convinced yourself of over the years, you still deserve to be happy."

"Maybe," Cabbie answered, rolling his nose away again, tucking himself back into the corner. "Or maybe I just missed my shot."

There was nothing to be said to that.

Watching as Wally's shimmer spread out across Cabbie's back and wings, trying to blanket the big plane in comfort, Blade very quietly showed himself out.

* * *

Nobody was in immediate evidence when Blade nosed Cabbie's door shut behind him again. It wasn't the silence of yesterday morning, though; he could hear the low rumbles of the Smokejumpers' engines somewhere off in the woods, Maru singing a loud and rather off-key rendition of _It's Still Rock and Roll to Me_ that was clashing badly with the up-tempo violin cover of _Toccata und Fuge_ drifting from Windlifter's hanger. A brief glance through the open door showed the Sikorsky mulling over one of the thick binders, propped up on a reading stand in front of him.

"He's with Maru," Windlifter informed him before Blade could even open his mouth, never looking away from the binder, and Blade blinked in confusion.

"Come again?"

"Nick is with Maru," Windlifter repeated patiently, turning the page with a practiced flick of his nose. When Blade held a level stare on his Lieutenant, the Sikorsky twitched his rotors with a sigh and finally looked up. "He is being repainted."

"I wasn't aware Maru had his paint." In fact, he was reasonably certain Maru _didn't_ have Nick's paint, since they had discussed it yesterday.

"Elizabeth," Windlifter answered simply, turning his attention back to the binder, and Blade felt his eyebrows lift in amusement.

"Did Maru ask, or was it her idea?"

Windlifter lifted his gaze for long enough to shoot Blade a very wry look, quirking an eyebrow before dropping his eyes back to the book. Although she didn't like to 'interfere' with the Team, Liz was one of the most efficient people Blade had ever met, and had occasionally anticipated a few of the Base's needs during Cad's reign. Apparently, that hadn't changed with the management shift.

"Of course. Tell her I said thanks," Blade nodded, not bothering to suppress the faint smile tugging at his mouth. Windlifter hummed back an acknowledgement, turning another page.

Over in the workshop, both Nick and Maru's sander joined in on the chorus. Neither one was a dramatic improvement on Maru's singing, and Windlifter rolled forward with a grimace to push his door shut. Stifling a snort of laughter, Blade headed for the overlook. From there, he'd be plenty close enough to Base to respond if there was an issue, but far enough away that he wouldn't hear the singing _that_ clearly.

* * *

Nick's repaint took most of the afternoon, which didn't surprise Blade in the least. Maru was meticulously thorough with his work when given the opportunity, and Nick had always been a bit prone to preening.

Not that Blade blamed him. He'd been struck by Nick's looks from the first moment they met; well, his looks and his resounding lack of common sense, but that was another story altogether.

And, hours later, when Nick finally emerged from Maru's shop to the waiting audience of the team, the sight of him struck Blade like a body-blow for one dizzying, breathless instant.

Nick's CHoPs paint was gone, the dusky burgundy and black he'd been wearing the day Blade first met him gleaming in the afternoon light, and, for a split second, it was as though the decades he'd been lost had vanished in the blink of an eye. That same brilliant, charismatic smile that Nick had first greeted him with flashed bright - almost as bright as the letters 'PPAA', unmistakeable and unmissable in crisp white on his tail.

There were a hundred things Nick was saying with those letters, and Blade knew his partner well enough to read most of them within those lines and curves of paint. _I'm part of this team now, like it or not, fly or fall, and I'll be right here next to you. I'm one of you, and I'm not giving up or going away without a fight._

Grinning at the Smokejumpers' enthusiastic whoops and cheers, Nick lifted his gaze and met Blade's eyes across the narrow stretch of concrete between them.

 _I'm not leaving you, Blaze._

Blade sucked in a breath through a throat gone tight and blinked his stinging eyes. He was not going to cry in front of his team, dammit, even if he had just been given a gift greater than he, than maybe anyone, deserved.

Around him, the excited hum of voices quieted suddenly, and Blade felt the cool edge of a shadow slide over his plating, up over his side, his rotors, until he was completely engulfed in it. Only two living members of his crew were big enough to cast a shadow like that, and Windlifter was on his other side.

Blade exhaled, slowly, then inhaled again, fighting the tightness in his throat, and let that breath out slower still, before finally turning to face the only member of his crew that hadn't been waiting for Nick's reveal.

Cabbie was raw-eyed and clearly exhausted, the expression on his face conveying the same shaken feeling that Blade had experienced the first time he'd seen Nick again. Over his starboard wing, Wally's shimmer gleamed, bigger and brighter than it had been before, the vague suggestion of a C-119's nose beginning to shape itself out of the light.

The Smokejumpers, who had been cheering Nick's new appearance with earsplitting enthusiasm, fell silent as one when the big plane ignored them and continued to roll forward, his gaze fixed on Nick.

Nick, who turned around to face Cabbie head-on, not even blinking when Cabbie halted, close enough that Nick had to tip back slightly on his skids to hold his gaze. Unlike that morning's confrontation in the main hanger, Nick remained quiet, his rotors hanging easily, and it was only his calm that kept Blade from physically shoving his way between them.

Just as the silence started to crackle with tension, Cabbie blinked, bobbing a short nod to Nick. "You look good," he said quietly.

Nick, rather than brushing the comment off, smiled softly, nodding back to the big plane. "Thanks, man." His eyes flicked sideways, catching on the bright gleam over Cabbie's wing. "Wally, good to see you, too."

The chuckle that answered that was completely audible - and not just to Blade, if the Smokejumper's startled looks and Dipper's squeak were any indication.

 _"Good to be seen,"_ Wally answered, his voice thin and hollow but distinct, and Cabbie's mouth twitched into a wry half-smile.

"Everyone," the big plane sighed, "I want you to meet Wally Buford."

[END CHAPTER 8]

* * *

Chapter 8 Notes:

The Silver Star was awarded for 'Gallantry in Action', and the Distinguished Service Cross was granted for 'Extraordinary Heroism in Combat'. Each main branch of the Armed Forces now has their own version of the Distinguished Service Cross, the modern equivalent of Cabbie's award being the Air Force Cross, but Cabbie's mission predates that change. The Purple Core (Purple Heart), for anyone not aware, is awarded to soldiers wounded in combat.

Although I cannot find it now, earlier in my research I did come across reports of a C-119 taking enemy ordinance through the tail and being able to complete its mission. (If you know where I saw that, please tell me, it's now driving me batty.)

Although Project Gunship III, which converted many C-119 cargo planes into heavy gunships, was not launched until 1968, fourteen years after Dien Bien Phu and Wally's death, headcanon here is that the USAF wouldn't have been sending these guys into the air defenseless - they would have had _some_ guns, the upgrades just added _more_. (Plus armor, flare launchers, infrared, and fun stuff like that!)

'Far greater eccentricities' - Blade's words, not mine. I am both ace and a firm believer in the genetic inherence of the Kinsey scale and do not consider any form of sexuality particularly 'eccentric.' However, I was also not active in 1970s Hollywood.

 _It's Still Rock and Roll to Me_ is by Billy Joel. Windlifter was listening to _Rock Symphonies_ , an album by an insanely talented violinist named David Garrett, who covers both classical music with a rock twist, and rock music with a classical twist. It's great writing/reading music, as there are no distracting lyrics but fantastic beats. Pretty much any music mentioned in the story either is currently or has been in my playlists at one point or another.

Erik Estrada's singing is... entertaining? There's a Youtube video of him singing 'Celebration' on CHiPs still floating around, it's easier to send you over to check that out than try to explain, quite honestly. It also shows you exactly why Nick is such a delightful, charming, and inspirational Muse, and you may read whatever amount of sarcasm into that you may prefer. Just Google 'Erik Estrada sings Celebration'. It really is worth watching, XDDDD


	9. Where There's Smoke

*CH9 Top Notes: Vehicular Aging, Jade's Headcanon: _A vehicle's model year is not when they were born/built, but when they reach legal age of majority._

So, without taking too many potshots at the Born-vs-Built thing (I would run out of room!) Jade's Theory of Vehicular Aging is thus: cars come into being as infants/sparklings/spawn/whatevers, and grow and age both physically and mentally. They reach legal age *at their model year.* In a Cars example: Doc Hudson, a 1951 model year Hudson Hornet, won his first Piston Cup in 1951. Since going from 'birth' to winning races all in the same year stretched my credulity (anthropomorphic vehicles, you will notice, do not), my canon became that cars have 18 years of development and maturation before they are considered 'adults'.

This is background for me, but as it's explicitly discussed in this chapter, now was as good a time as any to bring it up.

My only other 'major player' piece of headcanon which will come into play is my concept of 'cores' - essentially a physical embodiment of a vehicles soul, similar to a Transformer's spark, separate from brain, engine, etc. It's been mentioned once or twice in passing, and will come up in greater detail later.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER NINE**  
Where There's Smoke...

The next three days went by in a blur.

True to Maru's predictions, Nick aced every firefighting test that Blade could conceive of. He knew the regulations forwards, backwards, inside and out, in some cases better than Blade himself did - 'You'd leave the reg books open sometimes. I'd memorize whatever page you left them on, and then if it was in the public hangers, Windy would flip the pages for me,' - and, once Maru fitted him with the adapted tank - the glitter was nowhere in sight, which worried Blade almost more than the alternative - Nick was extinguishing the fire barrels flawlessly after his first two tries, which left Dusty and Dipper were both very vocally in awe. Augerin Canyon might as well have been a Sunday cruise - Nick went through it the first time with sharp, efficient control, all practical precision.

The second time, he went through it for sheer _fun_.

Dusty, who had landed on the narrow strip of clear and level ground on the canyon rim to watch Nick's runs, was left stammering over the radio. _*What - he - how? How were some of those moves even_ possible? _Helicopters aren't supposed to be able to do half of what he just did!*_

Blade, hovering where the bottom edge of bridge had been - the reconstruction hadn't begun yet, waiting on the immense metal support springs necessary to rebuild it - clicked his radio back in response.

"To be honest, Champ? It beats the Pit out of me, always has. Nick was one of the world's best aerobatic flyers back in the day, and nobody's really challenged the title since. I think he learned about the laws of physics just to figure out how to break them."

 _*I still have a hard time believing he studied physics,*_ Dusty admitted, the low hiss of static on the line not masking the sheepishness in his voice.

Blade didn't bother to stifle his snort, or his smirk. "I know he acts like an idiot, but it's intentional. At least half the time."

 _*Gee, thanks,*_ Nick commented wryly, shamelessly butting in on their frequency. _*And I manage the moves the same way Cabbie hauls around all five of those lead-assed kids of his - a shitload of practice and a whole lotta being awesome.*_

 _*Nick, Cabbie carrying over double his spec capacity isn't in the same class as a helicopter being able to do_ barrel rolls.*

 _*Nope, more in the same class as a crop duster winning air races.*_

Not much to argue with there.

Also true to predictions, the interference from the magnetic storms was growing steadily worse. Radio signals were coming through thick with static, and all three fixed-wing aircraft on the Base were feeling the effects. For Cabbie, it was blinding headaches that kept him in his hanger more often than not; for Dusty, intense vertigo - _'What do you mean, you were scared of heights?'_ \- and for Dipper...

"Are we sure she's not pregnant?" Nick asked wryly, and Blade rolled his eyes. As sorry as he felt for Dipper, having a plane - particularly a seaplane, who tended to be more resistant to motion sickness by design - get _airsick_ did have a darkly ironic hilarity to it.

"I think we'd have noticed," Blade pointed out, as Maru - who was starting to look a bit frazzled around the edges himself - met Dipper on the taxiway. There was a large mug in his tines, which probably contained either ginger or peppermint tea - Patch had turned the entire crew on to herbal teas a number of years ago, and Maru had added them to his treatment policies with enthusiasm.

"What, you think she can't keep a secret?"

"Dipper? Yes. Dusty? Not in a million years. Kid's a terrible liar."

Nick glanced away from where Dipper had parked herself on the runway, swaying ever-so-slightly on her tires and still looking distinctly unwell, sipping cautiously at the tea. "He had you fooled about his gearbox."

Blade snorted. "About the gearbox, maybe, but that something was wrong? No. Not a chance in the Pits the kid would have won races flying the way he did during training. I knew something was wrong, even if I didn't know what."

"Not your place to pry, huh?"

Sighing, Blade bumped up against Nick's side, giving himself a second to take comfort in his partner's solid presence. "We both had our secrets then, Nick."

"Not now?"

Blade slanted a look at his partner from the corner of his eye. "Dusty complimented you on your stamina this morning. If I've got any secrets left, I don't know 'em."

The gobsmacked look on Nick's face had been particularly entertaining, though, and Dusty had gone away practically radiating smug satisfaction, while Blade had tried to decide whether he needed to be embarrassed or not.

On the taxiway, Dipper's expression went from queasy to oh-slag, and she bolted for her hanger, slamming the door shut behind her. Maru, frowning, collected the half-empty cup and headed back for the workshop, probably in search of a stronger anti-nausea remedy.

The door of Cabbie's hanger was open a foot or so, enough to permit airflow, and Blade could see a sliver of Cabbie's face through the gap - asleep, or at least napping, but the corners of his eyes were tight with pain even in rest, and Blade knew full well that Maru had dosed him with something a lot stronger than tea that morning.

A short distance away, Avalanche and, bizarrely, Wally - back to his original shimmer form, although he'd been clearly defined from nose to wings this morning, when he'd informed Maru that Cabbie needed to be medicated - were hunkered down in the shadow of Windlifter's deck while the Sikorsky continued steadily lifting his logs above them. The slow, regular thump of wood against hard-packed soil almost covered the conversation - Avalanche was clearly taking pains to whisper, which probably brought his volume down to about normal speaking levels.

Even though the thought of what _that_ trio could be plotting was an immensely worrying consideration, it was something of a relief to Blade to see his Lieutenant engaged in his usual pastime.

Windlifter had made no discernible progress in his research thus far, and was rolling into the main hanger in the mornings bleary-eyed with exhaustion. Everyone on the team, from Patch and the Smokejumpers on upward, had offered to help him with the reading, but had all been met with polite, weary refusals. Part of it was undoubtedly Windlifter protecting the darker secrets of his people, but another part of it, which Blade discovered when the Sikorsky hauled his reading into the Main Hanger with him at lunchtime, was a slightly more practical issue.

Blade honestly hadn't meant to look at the papers - Windlifter had asked that they remain private, and he had every intention of respecting that - but he'd caught a glimpse by accident as he rolled by, and had to double back and look again out of sheer confusion. He honestly couldn't make heads or tails of the symbols on the pages Windlifter was currently studying; he could see what looked like standard Roman lettering in some places, an A, an E, a K, and a W, and something resembling a numeral four. The rest of it resembled lowercase Greek lettering more than anything else.

"So that's why you weren't worried about us readin' this one," Nick mused, peering around Blade's nose at the book, and Windlifter grunted a distracted acknowledgement. "What language is that, anyway?"

Patch, rolling towards the door with her Dusty mug filled to the brim, propeller spinning merrily, took a split-second glance at the page before declaring calmly, "Cherokee syllabary. It was developed by Sequoyah in the early 1800s to record their oral histories."

Avalanche, who had trailed Windlifter in, Wally shimmering over his canopy, perked up with apparent interest. "IT WAS DEVELOPED BY A TREE?"

Sometimes, Blade honestly couldn't tell when the kid was being sarcastic.

"Wait, you can talk to trees? Is that how you know what fires are doing before we do?" Apparently, sometimes Drip couldn't tell, either.

Dynamite cast Avalanche and Drip withering looks and headed for the coffeepot, shaking her head as she went. (Blade blamed the Disney Channel. The Smokejumpers had surrendered their evening CHoPs viewing for _Pocahontas_ last night, and Grandmother Willow had apparently made an impression.)

"He was a silversmith _named_ Sequoyah," Windlifter corrected, glancing up from the reading. His voice was lower than usual and raspy with exhaustion, and Maru, still nursing the third cup of coffee Blade had seen him down in the last twenty minutes, side-eyed the Sikorsky for a second before rolling out, frowning and muttering to himself.

"And I cannot talk to trees," Windlifter added. Blade - and Nick, if the gleam in his eyes was anything to go by - could hear the hint of mischief in the big chopper's voice, but it appeared no one else could.

When Drip and Avalanche actually looked disappointed by this (entirely logical) correction, Windlifter informed them, straight-faced, "I talk to the wind."

"Oh, for -" Blade started, but he was cut off by Nick's laughter and Drip's clamor of questions.

"I don't even want to know," Maru declared, rolling back in with a small paper box in his grasp and setting to work at the electric kettle beside the coffeepot. Several members of the team, Blade occasionally included, appreciated cocoa or tea in the evenings, and the flavor of overcooked dark-roast was so embedded in the coffee maker that it was more practical to have something else to heat water in.

A few minutes later, Maru rolled back to the table, carrying an open cup and a nozzle-lid. The steam wafting up from the liquid smelled spicy-sweet, and Blade sniffed appreciatively at the familiar aroma; a blend of licorice-mint tea and honey, Maru's favored remedy for a sore throat. Blade had put away about a gallon of the stuff after the mineshaft burnover in July, trying to ease the pain of smoke inhalation. Even the smell was soothing to him now, because of what it represented; comfort, care, friendship, and, above all, safety.

Safety was, he reflected with a strut-deep sigh as the siren blared across the base, something that tended to be in very short supply in his life.

Across the table, Windlifter shut the binder with a flip of his nose, gulped down the tea without a flinch, regardless of the fact that it must have still been near boiling, and headed for the door, Nick bounding out on his tail.

Sooner or later, due to the law of averages if nothing else, something in Blade's life would turn out to be uncomplicated.

Not this week, though.

* * *

This was _bad_.

Not July-bad, which had reset Blade's personal metric of badness, hopefully for a good long while, but it was getting close. Thursday night's rain might as well have been a dream for all the help it was being now - which was to say, none. The fire had started on a broad mountain ledge halfway between the Peak and La Parilla, south and east of the damage from last July's fire. It would have been a minor annoyance if gravity hadn't gotten involved in an annoyingly _major_ fashion, bouncing flaming chunks of log down the hillside, past their retardant lines, and sparking off more spotfires than they could contain. The call was already in for mutual aid, but it could be hours before that would arrive, and this fire was not going to wait.

The biggest concern, given the location, was the Lodge. The clear space around it, which Spinner had grudgingly allowed and Jammer had wisely expanded, opting for flagstoned paths and rock gardens, offered it some protection, and the lines of retardant they were laying offered more. Even so, the evacuation order had been issued, and the roof sprinklers were on - with only the Lodge's share of water, thankfully.

Against both regulations and Blade's better judgment, but out of sheer necessity, all three of the team's planes had fought through their respective symptoms to battle the fire. Cabbie had dropped the Smokejumpers above the fire's northern edge, between the Lodge and the fire, and had wisely headed back to Base as soon as they were safely down. Wally was with him, so strong now that Blade could actually see the entire, if transparent, shape of a second C-119 flying alongside Cabbie, not just an indistinct shimmer. Dipper was working with Windlifter, who Blade knew would keep a close eye on her safety, to keep the fire from spreading further south and west, where it would threaten the roadways and the ongoing evacuation. Meanwhile Nick, Dusty, and Blade were alongside the Smokejumpers, working feverishly to form protective lines between the Lodge and the head of the fire.

Blade watched with a critical eye as Dusty rose slowly from his airdrop elevation, taking a slow and deliberate bank out of Nick's way. If the kid was feeling as dizzy as he said, he was doing a damn good job of not letting on.

"You doing all right, Champ?"

 _*I've been worse,*_ Dusty answered, the grim tightness in his tone evident even through the constant, ocean-tide rush of static on the line. _*Heading back to reload.*_

"Keep me apprised. Nick -"

 _*Goin',*_ Nick replied, before Blade could even complete the thought, and peeled off his orbit to flank Dusty back to the Base.

Between them, they were managing to keep eyes on the racer just about every second, and if he showed the slightest waver, Blade was getting him back to base and grounding him there, needed or otherwise. Windlifter had the same orders regarding Dipper. The Lodge was not more important than his people.

Anchor Lake was half the distance away that the Base was, but the crosswinds had picked up enough that Blade felt justified in ordering everyone reload at Base, up to and including Windlifter. It gave Maru a chance to keep an eye on their conditions, and the retardant was a more useful tool in this battle than pure water would be anyway.

"Ranger!"

Blade actually yelped, shooting a good ten feet straight upwards in the air before he got a handle on himself. Of all the things he'd expected to happen today, having the enormous, transparent form of a P-3 Orion appear just outside his rotor span didn't even come close to making the list.

Without waiting for him to regain his composure, Richter spun in the air and shot off, arrowing towards the western end of the line, where the Smokejumpers were working. Feeling his lines seize with dread, Blade pushed his engines to their max to follow. The dull hiss of static coming over the radio was still omnipresent, and he fought through it now.

"Dynamite, report. Dynamite, do you copy?"

The reply, when it came, was so laden with static that he could barely make it out.

 _* - opy, nee-... We - ... -rouble!*_

It told him as much as he needed to know. _Copy. In trouble._

He could see their lights now, their bright paint obscured beneath dirt and ash, swarming frantically around a single tree that had come down across the line. The tree was smoldering, not burning, and the retardant lines laid on the unburned side of the firebreak seemed to be doing their job - the downed tree hadn't yet sparked off a new fire, so what -

His subconscious processed what he was seeing a split-second before his brain; he felt his intakes seize with a fear he hadn't felt in months, not since he watched Dusty falling towards the forest amidst a plume of engine smoke.

Four Smokejumpers swarming around the tree. One of them under it.

He was on the radio before he'd even gotten close enough to identify which Smokejumper was caught, calling for both Windlifter and the Base, but the only response was static. He left the channel open with an automated emergency ping running - one that Maru had termed the 'slag has hit the fan' signal - and headed in.

It was Drip, Blade realized, looping as low as he dared over the firebreak. Still conscious, pinned but not crushed beneath the weight of a a ponderosa as big around as Dynamite, conscious enough to be talking to Blackout, although his expression was hazy. Frowning, Blade turned back and hovered, eyeing the lay of the tree for a moment. The limbs on the ground side had mostly snapped on landing, and the entire upper half of the tree was propped up by a few branches that had speared into the ground, the balance tenuous enough that any attempt to shift or cut the tree would most likely bring it down the rest of the way. The trunk of the tree had broken about twelve feet off the ground, and was attached only by a twisted mass of rapidly burning splinters that he doubted would hold for long.

Dynamite barked out a couple of orders, out of Blade's hearing, and took over Blackout's position talking to Drip, undoubtedly keeping her teammate calm and still, while the others scattered to work; Blackout on the green side of the line, cutting long sections of thick logs, which Avalanche was shoving back across the break to Pinecone, who, in turn, was placing them carefully upright between the trunk of the tree and the ground to either side of Drip. Braces, Blade realized, watching the team work, so that if the branches broke or the base burned through, the trunk would land on the braces, rather than dropping straight to the ground and compacting Drip in the process.

Blade's eyes darted back along the trunk of the tree again, his concern mounting as he eyed the sullen glow of embers amidst the scaly bark - a glow that was brightening rapidly in the unchecked breeze funneled through the firebreak. They had a matter of minutes before that tree went up in flames, and not many minutes, at that. If there was going to be any chance of getting Drip out in one piece, it would mean either digging him out, which they were not equipped to do, or lifting the tree off him.

It wasn't the biggest ponderosa Blade had ever seen, but it was sure as Pits outside the Jumper's ability to lift from below. Windlifter was too far out to arrive in time, even if Blade could get a signal to him.

One option left. He could imagine Nick and Maru yelling at him already.

Mindful of his rotor wash, Blade dipped as low as he dared and shouted down to the Jumpers in lieu of the radio. "I'll lift the end. Be prepared to steady it, and get Drip clear!"

Turning himself to the right angle, Blade slid his hoist hatch back and aimed carefully, whipping the cable between the branches of the tree with practiced precision. It looped once, twice around the trunk, shaking the tree slightly before Pinecone's rake stabilized it, and the hook snapped securely around the cable again. Even with the dull sensation of the cable, he could feel the heat within the tree's trunk. They were running out of time. 

* * *

The radio had gone to nothing but spitting static in Nick's ears, and that worried him a lot more than he would have thought. The fire wasn't completely contained, but it was getting there, the lack of cars near the Lodge suggested that the evacuation was safely complete, and he'd seen Dipper en route back to the southern lines a few minutes ago, looking queasy but her flight steady as ever.

Beyond the usual active-fire tension, there wasn't a reason for the tense knot of worry in his tank. Blade had put together a good, solid team here -

 _A self-sacrificing team -_

and Blade himself was a smart, competent leader -

 _He put his life on the line for his people -_

who would keep everyone safe -

 _\- whatever it cost him -_

Off to Nick's port, Dusty gave a vague wobble in the air, and Nick's attention snapped from his increasingly worried thoughts to the plane flying below him. "You okay, kid?"

Rather than answering, Dusty tipped slightly in the air, dropping his port wingtip to squint up at Nick. "You do realize that I'm technically older than you, right? You stopped aging in nineteen-eighty-three."

"I'm still a seventy-two model," Nick pointed out, more for the sake of being annoying than anything else, because the kid was, what, a pre-1990 model, right? Which meant he was at least... slag, forty-six?!

"Chrysler," Nick muttered, glancing down again when he realized how quiet Dusty had gone. The expression on the plane's face was an odd mixture of sadness and confusion, one that only intensified when he glanced back up at Nick.

"You were only twenty-nine?"

Nick winced at a flash of memory; Blade and Maru, a few days after Nick's death, empty bottles of high-grade coping mechanism scattered across the floor, Blade beyond words, Maru's unsteady voice a constant litany of 'too young, too damned young...'

"Whaddya mean, 'only'? I looked damn good for my age!" Nick shot back, hoping his grin covered the jab of guilty pain from the memory.

Dusty's flat look suggested that he'd been less successful at that than he hoped. "How can you laugh about it, Nick? You _died!_ "

"Trust me, I'm aware," Nick shot back. "And you know what? I hated myself for it, for a lot of reasons. I was right there with Blaze and Maru, watchin' them mourn me, knowin' it was my fault they were in that much pain. I spent thirty years watchin' them suffer for my stupidity. Situation like that, you got two choices, kid, you either cope or you go crazy. I was already crazy, so y'know what? I coped."

Dusty fell silent again, staring down at the surface of the lake passing beneath them. The water was jagged with rippling wavelets, sharp crosswinds agitating the usually mirror-smooth surface.

Nick sympathized.

"You didn't, though."

It took Nick a moment of backtracking through their conversation to figure out what the Pits Dusty was talking about. "What, cope? I think I'm doin' okay."

"But you still blame yourself for dying," Dusty pointed out, his tone quiet and utterly reasonable. Nick wanted to hit him.

"Of course I do, I was bein' stupid -"

"Where you trying to? Die, I mean?"

"You askin' if I was suicidal?" Nick fought to keep any anger from seeping into his voice; he had no right to be offended, it wasn't a battle he'd ever fought. But Blaze...

Then again, it may have been a battlefield Dusty had found himself on once or twice, too. Those crashes, and that nightmare Nick had pulled him from...

"I wasn't," Nick answered, feeling like an hour had gone by before he could find the words. His internal clock told him it hadn't even been a minute.

"If it was an accident, then why do you still blame yourself?" Dusty asked, the tone pragmatic and level and inescapable.

Nick growled at him in response. "When did you turn into a shrink?"

"I was talking to Skipper last night - he's the old Corsair, my flight coach? - and thinking about Cabbie and Wally. Skipper lead a mission during World War Two that went bad, and he felt so guilty about it that he didn't fly again until a couple of years ago."

"Yeah? What got him off the ground?" Nick asked, eying the steadily approaching Canopy Dome as he flickered through the radio channels again, checking the Team's main channel before moving on to all of the secondary frequencies. Static, static, more static. Something was just not right here, and he didn't think it was just the magnetic interference.

"Keeping me from getting murdered."

Nick was distracted enough by what sounded like a static echo on the main frequency that it took a second for the words to actually process. "Wait, what?"

"On the last leg of the Wings Around the Gl-"

"Lopez!"

Dusty let out an inarticulate squawk and rolled sideways into a deliberate tumble, dumping a hundred feet of altitude before he leveled off; Nick, by contrast, shot twenty feet upward, his reaction far more articulate but unprintable.

"Chrysler!" Stabilizing into a hover, Nick fought to ease off the frantic RPMs of his engine and turned to face the massive, transparent form of the P-3 Orion that had just appeared off his starboard, barely outside of his rotor disk. "Richter?! What in the Pits?!"

"One of the Smokejumpers is trapped," came the reply, low and gravely-voiced. "Ranger is going to injure himself getting it out."

For a split-second, Nick felt nothing but blank, terrified incomprehension. Then, just as quickly, everything settled in his mind. "Inform Windlifter," he ordered, already pointing his nose back towards the fire lines. The flicker of shock he felt when the huge plane merely nodded and vanished into midair was shoved down and ignored; he could deal with that later. "Dusty, return to Base, brief Patch and Maru, reload, and back us up."

Dusty didn't question the order, peeling off from the orbit he'd been holding below Nick and shooting towards the Base with a roar of his engine, as Nick put every ounce of power he could muster to his rotors and headed back to where he belonged; his partner's side.

[END CHAPTER NINE]

* * *

CH 9 NOTES:

1 - If there is any chapter in which my accuracy is going to fall apart, it's this one. I fully admit that I sacrificed my usual research for plot dramaz, and apologize.

2 - However, it is, in fact, possible to do barrel rolls in a helicopter. If you're Chuck Aaron, anyway. Search him on YouTube and be amazed! The United States' only certified helicopter aerobatics pilot, he performs nigh-incomprehensible maneuvers including rolls, loops, and Split-S turns in a modified MBB Bo-105 helicopter. That was, of course, my inspiration for deciding Nick's heritage. Aaron was also a technical consultant for the Planes films, which is why our introduction to Blade includes that beautiful loop. Although only three people in the world are licensed at Aaron's level, Blade's casual execution of the loop suggests it's not quite so rare a talent in the Cars 'verse.

3 - The Cherokee syllabary is essentially as described, including its invention, and you can look up charts to see the writing if you're curious. It's really quite beautiful.

4 - For those unfamiliar with Ponderosa pines, they can get pretty huge. The largest one on record is 235' tall with a circumference of twenty-seven feet, over a hundred inches in diameter. I used a wood calculator for a few options around one-third of that size, and came up with a tree weighing 8 to 12 tons. (For reference, Dusty probably weighs somewhere in the 2.5 ton range with his SEAT mods included and is at the outside of Blade's carrying capacity, hence why Maru and Nick will be yelling.)

5 - And for those of you who don't read my works in other fandoms - yes, dramatic, is-X-character-alive?!-cliffhangers are common for my series, and tend to increase in frequency in direct proportion to the number of chapters in the story. Also, before you begin lobbing rotten produce or rusty bolts at my head, I'm not killing off anybody. Just... denting them a little. Maru has fixed worse.


	10. Ridin' the Storm Out

**ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER TEN**  
Ridin' The Storm Out

Maru knew something was wrong the second he heard Dusty approaching the Base.

For one thing, Nick had been making the loop alongside the kid, every damned time, and there was no low beat of rotor blades under the sharper pitch of Dusty's engine. For another, that 'sharper pitch' was a lot higher up the scale than it usually was - the kid was making his approach with his engine at max, which... well, it sure as Pits wasn't anything _good_.

Maru rolled out onto the taxiway, praying to forces he'd stopped believing in too many years ago to count that they weren't gonna be adding another picture to The Wall before the day was done.

The kid hit the runway hard, bounced twice, and must've sat on his brakes the third time, if the overheated smell that wafted up on the blueish rubber smoke was any indication, but he'd come in so fast that he was still rolling just from momentum when he got to where Maru waited. Rather than halting at the workshop, though, the kid swung himself around to the tanks, waiting impatiently as Maru crossed the concrete to reload him. Maybe the fire had just gotten worse?

"One of the Smokejumpers is trapped, Blade's trying to rescue him but the ghost said he'd hurt himself, and the radios aren't working _at all_ ," Dusty rattled off as soon as Maru got within earshot, which... yeah. Bad.

"Who and how bad?" Maru demanded, tines working on autopilot as he attached the hose. The radios being down was the worst part of that equation, because if Windlifter couldn't be alerted to medevac -

"Don't know, he didn't say." Dusty was twitching on his wheels, searching the sky above the Base as though he was expecting someone to appear and enlighten him at any moment. "Nick sent him to get Windlifter and told me to tell you, reload, and back him up."

The retardant flow shut off with a soft 'thunk' that was barely audible under the low roar of Dusty's engine, and Maru scrambled to get the hose off before Dusty rolled away with it still attached. "Which ghost?"

"The Orion," Dusty answered, waggling a wing flap in the general direction of The Wall. He was already pointing his nose back to the runway, which was the only reason he missed the incredulous look that flickered over Maru's face.

Richter had never been the friendliest of guys, or the most concerned with the wellbeing of his teammates. If he was suddenly offering his help, unasked-for, the situation was probably worse than bad.

Shoving the hose nozzle back into its holding bracket, Maru headed full-tilt for the workshop to start assembling his supplies.

He was halfway through staging fluids when he realized his tines were shaking.

Sitting back on his wheels, Maru exhaled a slow breath. _Thirty-one years_. Decades with the steadiest tines in the business, and now he couldn't stop them shaking. Three decades he'd been trailing Blade around, waiting for that last straw to snap. Three decades he'd been ignoring or drowning his own issues at every opportunity, pretending that he wasn't seeing the ghosts of his failures lurking behind the guy he'd dedicated the better part of his life to saving.

"Maru?"

Well, he didn't drop anything that time, so that was good. Setting the length of hydraulic tubing carefully on a clean strip of workbench, Maru turned to face Cabbie, who was peering through the door of the workshop, concern and pain battling for dominance on his face. Big guy's migraine must have been downright agonizing for it to be showing up that clearly. Beside him, still transparent but now unquestionably visible, Wally peered in as well, hovering enough to sit over Cabbie's wing.

"Yeah?"

"Somethin' wrong on the line? Dusty came in pretty hot." Cabbie's eyes flicked over the staging Maru was doing, and he bit back a visible grimace. "Forget I asked. How bad?"

"Pits if I know. All I've got is that it involves a Jumper and Blade. Apparently Richter corralled Nick in midair to give him that information, Dusty got sent back to Base to play relay, and with the radios not working, I have no clue how bad this is getting!" He was yelling by the last words, he realized, and took a couple of deep breaths as he set about collecting the rest of his equipment. If the exhales came out sounding like a combine about to charge, so be it.

"A Smokejumper?" Wally echoed, leaning a little further into the shop, his starboard wing halfway through the wall and his port one halfway through Cabbie. Cabbie didn't bat an eye - maybe icepacks would help with his headache? He could lay tines on some isopropyl alcohol and water easily enough for makeshift cold packs...

"They're still on this end of the fire, right?" Wally continued, snapping Maru out of his momentary contemplation. "Closest to the Lodge?"

Maru paused, looking up from his welding cart, where he was checking the cylinder valves of his cutting torch on autopilot. "Last I knew. Why?"

He managed, though barely, not to drop the torch head on the floor as Wally simply vanished from sight without a sound. Cabbie merely blinked, either too accustomed to it to be surprised or in too much pain to react.

"Uhm." Coiling the hose up and slinging the torch head carefully over the handlebar of the cart, Maru rolled the welding rig carefully off to the side before going back to the shelves for his surgical toolkit. "Where did he just go?"

"To check on the Smokejumpers," Cabbie answered levelly, without the sarcasm that the majority of the Base's other inhabitants would have managed to inject in those words. "He'll be back with a status report in -"

"A ponderosa fell on Drip!"

Maru _did_ drop his toolbox at that one, and his surprise at Wally's reappearance was definitely not the major factor. "Drip's -"

"Alive, conscious, semi-coherent, definite concussion, other injuries unknown," Wally rattled off, and Maru abruptly found he could breathe again.

"Wally, lead with that part next time," Cabbie sighed, as Maru gathered his toolbox back up. The latch had held, so hopefully the contents of the box weren't too rattled.

"What about Blade?"

"He's tryin' to lift an end of the tree so that Dynamite can haul the kid clear. He'll stress his systems, but it shouldn't kill 'im."

"You haven't been paying much attention, have you?" Maru muttered, the wry sarcasm shakier than it would have been otherwise.

"Before July, or after?" Wally shot back, earning a faint chuff of laughter from Cabbie and an eyeroll from Maru.

Wally had a point, after all. No way in the Pits was Blade gonna check out now, when he had everything he ever wanted right at his tires. Meaningful job, awesome home, great friends, his partner by his side.

Still, something was telling Maru not to put the toolkits away just yet. Where Windlifter could sense and read the weather and the actions of the fires with an accuracy that had actually made Maru - and, more impressively, Blade - believe in clairvoyance - Maru had a similar, if slightly less spectacular, ability to sense immanent catastrophe.

It had been a dull buzz at the back of his mind the entire time Cad was in charge of the park, but, really, that just proved that it worked.

Right now, that sense was buzzing like a Bug had gotten into his interior, and he had learned better than to ignore it.

* * *

Three minutes later, he was proven exactly right, when Richter appeared on the taxiway to announce that Blade was down.

* * *

The steady rumble of Windlifter's rotors carried far ahead of the helicopter himself - doubly so when he was accompanied by both Nick and Dusty. The latter was wide-eyed and shaking, landing even harder than he had previously before whipping back to the retardant tanks; Nick, by contrast, seemed entirely composed, until Maru saw the expression in his eyes.

"What happened?" Maru demanded, eyes on the sky and Windlifter's approaching form, rather than Nick's frantic, burning gaze. Behind him, he was only distantly aware of Patch rolling down from the Tower to get Dusty reloaded.

"Million-to-one," Nick answered grimly. His accent rolled heavily over the words, months under the tutelage of a dialect coach swept away by stress and fear. "He got the tree off Drip, an' a second tree came down on his cable. Took him to ground."

That made twice in the last five months that Blade had been reintroduced to the ground the hard way. That about tied the record Nick had set in the earliest days of his trick flying, back before anyone had figured out helicopters could actually go upside-down and survive. Maru had replaced Nick's entire rotor assembly _twice_ during CHoP's second season. Personally, he blamed the _Supercopter_ episode. "How bad?"

Nick's lips thinned. "Bad enough. He hit the burning side of the break, so he's got surface burns, impact damage, sheered rotors, you name it. Missed gettin' impaled on a tree by about six inches."

Great. July, all over again. Except hopefully Blade had escaped this one cooked medium-rare instead of well-done. Maru still wasn't sure he'd managed to scrub all the soot out of Blade's innards from his last round of barbecuing. On the up side, the worst part of July had been the heat damage, not the crash damage - although Blade's rotor hub was not going to hold up if he insisted on smashing his rotor blades into the ground - so Ford willing, he wouldn't have to fight Blade back from the edge of death this afternoon.

It wasn't the most enjoyable way to pass the time.

The roar of an engine marked Dusty's departure again, and Patch rolled back from the tanks to sit off Maru's flank, the picture of patient calm. With the radios down, she'd be an extra pair of tines where Maru needed them.

At the corner of the building, Cabbie loomed forward, Wally's transparent form over his wing making him unnecessarily taller. There were still pain lines at the corners of his eyes, but the gaze he fixed on Nick was as clear as ever.

"How's Drip?"

"Concussed," Nick answered tersely, his eyes still on the approaching Windlifter and Blade's motionless form hanging beneath him. "He's lucky his canopy's reinforced. Dynamite's gettin' him to their fallback zone, and Blackout's holdin' the line with the other two. Windlifter'll get him once Blade's set."

Speak of the devil, Windlifter was clearing the edge of the cliff now. No matter how many times he saw it - nine times in the last twenty-five years, which was about ten times more than Maru would have liked - it didn't get easier to see his best friend dangling unconscious in Windlifter's sling.

Windlifter was an old pro at this, but it didn't stop Maru from guiding him down every inch of the way until Blade's tires were settled on the concrete - so sue him, he was a bit of a control freak. It came with the job. Although his job was a lot easier when he had a bunch of burly earthmovers to help with the grunt work. There was only one of him, which was a matter he might have to address if this level of chaos was going to be par for the course from now on.

Maru rolled around Blade's nose to unhook the tow straps, wincing as he caught sight of Blade's starboard side. The hoist itself had been ruinously twisted, the cable snapped and frayed, and the mounting plate had been ripped half out of Blade's interior. The metal had torn in jagged edges before the bolts had finally sheered, which had to be hellaciously painful in and of itself. Never mind the snapped rotors, the crumple damage that ran from his nose to his rear landing gear, or the heat-bubbled paint on top of that.

None of it was gonna kill him, just hurt like slag for a while. The rotors would be the biggest problem, though...

"Why's that?"

"Huh?" Maru blinked, tearing his eyes away from Blade's interior to look at Nick, but the other helicopter was on Blade's opposite side; from the position of his skids, he was by Blade's rear hatch, probably doing a rapid check of the components Maru had replaced only a few months ago.

"He's only got a couple 'a leaks here, they're minor. Why're his rotors gonna be a problem?"

He'd been saying all that out loud? Well, slag... "I'm guessing you remember July?"

Nick hopped sideways to look at him from underneath Blade's tail boom, his expression eloquent enough to spell out any number of words. Most of them had four letters.

Patch, ignoring them both, scooted around Blade's nose to free up the straps, waving to Windlifter as soon as they were clear, and the big chopper winched his lines up and swung away, heading back towards the fire lines to retrieve Maru's other patient.

Maru blinked a bit of grit out of his eye that had been thrown up by Windlifter's wash, making a mental note to clean his drop-off area a bit better. He preferred his patients to be sanded _after_ the damage had been repaired, not before. "Well, when Blade busted his rotors, I replaced them. Which was good because it meant those RVs didn't become permanent residents of Augerin Canyon, but it's now bad because they were the only ones that fit him I had in stock. They're on backorder from our usual supplier, and I can't fabricate the style he uses."

"Oh, great. Make sure you got a camera rolling when you tell him, huh?" Nick chuckled, the sound weak and the accompanying grin clearly forced. "If you gotta find a new supplier, delivery'll take, what, a week?"

"I'll have Liz find them," Maru sighed, nodding a thanks to Patch as she came back with the tow hook. "But a few days, at least. Which means you and Windlifter are gonna be running things in the air until he's back on duty or ranking mutual aid arrives."

Nick's startled, indignant squawk sounded like a slipping tensioner belt, and Maru had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing, even as he threw his weight against the tow hook to haul Blade into the workshop. Damn helicopter had been eating better over the last four months, and it felt like he'd put on a hundred pounds!

"You can't - I'm not - I been certified for two days, I can't take command!"

"You've been as good as certified for twenty-five years, you idiot. Now reload and go make sure Dusty's got that end of the line under control, Blade's not going to recover any faster with you hanging over him like a vulture!"

Maru's Spanish had gotten rusty enough that he wasn't entirely sure what Nick called him, but he probably didn't want to know anyway.

* * *

He was already up to his eyeballs in patching Blade back together by the time Windlifter returned with Drip, who smiled fuzzily in his direction and couldn't get his eyes to focus, but answered Cabbie's worried questions about his name, his teammates' names, the date, ('I think it's a Tuesday?'), how many of Cabbie did he see, ('Two, but I think the other one is Wally...') and did he remember what happened, ('A tree fell over and I was under it. Is the Chief okay?') coherently enough that when Cabbie volunteered to look after him, Maru didn't argue. He had his tines full enough with Blade, and Cabbie had both field-triage training and more practical experience than he probably wanted in dealing with concussed Smokejumpers.

"Just check in with me hourly," Maru ordered around the clamp in his teeth, and went back to replacing leaking lines.

Twenty minutes after the fourth check-in, Maru still had his tines in Blade, smoothing down the welds on Blade's interior plating, when the chopper drifted back to consciousness. The hoist would need to be completely rebuilt, if not replaced, but he also didn't want the Chief rolling around with a gaping hole in his interior until he got it sorted. The fact that he'd be sporting an empty rotor hub for the next week was going to be bad enough.

The faintest breath of a groan was his only indication that his friend was awake. Blade had an innate _stillness_ to him, something Windlifter had long ago mastered but seemed beyond the comprehension of the rest of the team, Maru included. Blade didn't twitch or jerk or wiggle his way back to awareness, which almost every other slagging member of the team did - Maru was still debating the virtue of getting his own canopy reinforced for working with the Smokejumpers, all of whom tended to wake up swinging. Blade, by contrast, woke up with barely a change in the rhythm of his breathing - just a low, almost sub-vocal groan escaped him as the pain from his injuries reached his awareness.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Maru said dryly, rolling back to set the grinder aside, not taking much note of the thin, pained sound that escaped Blade. Crash damage _hurt_ , and having parts of yourself beaten into submission and welded back together to fix said crash damage tended to be uncomfortable at best.

And then he turned around and saw Blade's face.

He'd seen Blade in every kind of pain before - physical, emotional, you name it, and it was nothing to the agony on the chopper's face right now.

"Blade?! Chrysler, what -"

"I dreamed," Blade answered, his voice barely more than a choked whisper, a ragged sob catching at the back of his throat. "Maru, I _dreamed - Nick_ -" The word vanished into a wordless keen, a high, tortured noise that sounded like it was being ripped from Blade's very core.

It took a second of processing for the forklift. Screaming emotional agony. Crash damage, including burns.

Blade thought it was still _July_. Thought he'd dreamed everything after he'd gone down in that ash-choked field outside a burned mine shaft. Thought he'd dreamed the last four months and all the happiness he'd found in them.

Oh, for the love of Chrysler. Maru whipped back around and slammed his tine into Blade's side, just in front of the hoist hatch, as hard as he possibly could.

It was one more dent he'd have to hammer out of the damn chopper's hide, but it snapped Blade out of his spiral, at least, back into gasping quiet. "You did not - wait a second. WALLY!"

Almost instantly, the C-119's transparent form snapped into existence in front of them, concern spread across his features. Across the runway, Cabbie's hanger door had already shifted open, Drip and Cabbie poking their noses out with nearly identical expressions of worry.

"Y'need me?" Wally asked, eyeing Blade with clear alarm. The chopper had started shaking, trembling hard enough under Maru's tine that he resigned himself to having to check every hose connection he'd just redone yet again.

"Go pull Nick off the line, tell him Blade's awake," Maru ordered, keeping his voice low. "And... tell him to hurry back, wouldya?"

Wally, for his part, glanced from Maru back to Blade, nodded in what looked like complete understanding, and vanished again.

"I thought -"

Maru, sighing softly, patted Blade's trembling side with his tine, gently as he could in front of the large dent he'd created. "Same damage, I know. Minus about five levels of done-ness, thank Ford. But it's okay, Blade. You didn't dream it. Nick really is back, you are not living in a television trope, I did fix Dusty, you can see ghosts, and your life is completely insane."

That earned him a thick, ragged cough, Blade's grief slowly ebbing into embarrassment. "Maru, make me a promise."

Well, this couldn't be anything good. "What's that?"

"If Nick goes down before me..." Blade let the sentence trail off, but Maru could finish it easily enough. It was a request that went against every medical instinct Maru had, every day, every _minute_ of effort over the last thirty years he'd fought to keep Blade alive. Countless days of cajoling, arguing, or verbally bulldozing him into taking care of himself. Countless nights where he'd stayed awake on coffee and desperation, hunkered in the corner of wherever Blade was staying just to make sure the chopper woke up again.

And then he thought of the last few days again, how he got to wake up in the morning knowing he would see his best friend's smile, hear laughter ringing across the Base as Nick told off-color jokes to the team over breakfast. Blade had been his best friend since the day Nick went down, and the past week was the happiest Maru had ever seen him.

Sometimes, friendship meant doing what you knew was best, even if you knew it wasn't right. "Okay, Blade. I promise."

[END CHAPTER 10]

* * *

Chapter 10 Notes:

1) One part isopropyl alcohol to three parts water in a resealable bag makes super-cheap, convenient ice packs that stay soft even when cold - great for icing sports injuries! And yes, Maru would likely have it around, since it's very useful for auto detailing (it cuts pine sap, which probably comes in handy for Windlifter and the Jump crew) as well as being an effective, and much cheaper, substitute for DriGas.

2) Season Two of CHiPs saw a distinct escalation in the number and level of stunts shown, both by 'crash victims' and by the boys themselves. The _Supercopter_ episode, mentioned in the movie, is a joke on S2E10 of CHiPs, _Supercycle_ , in which the CHiPs chase, but cannot catch, an extremely souped-up stunt bike that can outperform their patrol motorcycles. Ponch (the best motorcyclist in the department) is then cleared to ride an experimental high-performance police bike that can match the Supercycle, which seems mostly an excuse for Ponch to have fun doing jumps with it. (During testing of the bike, Jon lays it down in a fairly spectacular fashion, leading to Ponch's funny aneurysm line 'I've never really watched you crash before. You do it very well.')

3) _A "Funny Aneurysm" is when a scene, joke, or offhand line that was originally meant to be funny or light-hearted makes the viewer cringe when it is seen in reruns due to the traumatic events in future episodes of a show or in real life. - TV Tropes._

4) Despite not knowing how to ride a motorcycle when he was cast for CHiPs, Erik Estrada became an extremely proficient rider, and did a number of his own stunts on the show. However, Nick's crash is actually based on fact. When filming of a stunt went drastically wrong, Estrada first landed facedown on the hood of a car before his motorcycle flipped over on top him, resulting in fractured ribs and sternum, punctured lungs, a broken wrist, and a cracked jaw. He spent several days in intensive care with a 50/50 chance of survival, and remained confined to the hospital for some time afterwards. He filmed two episodes from his hospital bed, and the remainder of the season was partially rewritten to include his accident. The episode from which the rewrite began was Season 3's - take a guess - _Return of the Supercycle_! (Yes. Seriously.)

5) Yes, Maru really _does_ always aim for that same spot in front of Blade's hoist hatch, and has since _Saving Tomorrow_. And yes, he promised exactly what you think he did, which is inexpressibly cruel of Blade to ask, but Maru completely understands.

6) 'You are not living in a television trope' - the 'it was all just a dream' ending. If you have a few days of your life to waste on being very entertained, check out the TV Tropes site.

7) Chapter title from the REO Speedwagon song of the same name.


	11. What Was Lost

Ch11 Top Notes: I wrote two-thirds of this chapter in one sitting, after several days of not-enough-sleep and a significant dose of caffeine, looked back on it, and pretty much went 'WTF did I just write?!' However, since it hit most of the major plot points I was aiming for, albeit not exactly at the angles I was planning to shoot from, I didn't try to untangle the bewildering knots of WTF-ery.

TL:DR: Nick is a bad influence. Shocking.

Also, many more references to AmbulanceRobot's _War Stories_ , because of awesomeness.

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER ELEVEN**  
What Was Lost

"You asked him to _WHAT?"_

The roar from the Blade's hanger echoed across the Base loudly enough to make most of the team jump. Dusty, in particular, gave a sharp twitch before settling back down with a loud squeak of metal shifting on metal.

"Do I want to know?"

A little surprised at the question, Maru glanced up from where he was poking a screwdriver into the landing gear of Dusty's starboard pontoon. It had taken a beating with how hard the kid had been landing today, which was why, an hour past sunset, Dusty was perched on a rolling lift, lopsided and less than comfortable, while Maru fiddled with his pontoon's gear on the other side of the room.

"Probably not," Maru grumbled, dropping the screwdriver and grabbing for a line clamp instead. How the kid had managed to pinch _that_... "And even if you did, it's not your business. It's between me and Blade."

"And Nick."

"Everything that involves Blade involves Nick."

Dusty gave a vaguely acknowledging sort of grunt and wiggled his starboard struts, apparently fascinated by the lack of pontoon on the end of them.

"Quit that, you're gonna knock something out of alignment. Other than your brain, I mean."

"Hah hah," Dusty deadpanned back, and waggled them again, more deliberately.

Maru threw the screwdriver at him.

It bounced harmlessly off Dusty's canopy, well behind his eyes, exactly where Maru had intended, but set off another round of wiggling, which had been very much the opposite of his intentions. "Kid, if you don't hold still I'm gonna strap you to the lift!"

Dusty paused in his irritable wiggling to shoot Maru an expression of utter disbelief. "You wouldn't."

"You wanna bet? I welded a Smokejumper to the wall, once."

"You did not!"

"Oh yes I did! Ask any of the air crew tomorrow if you don't believe me. I take slag from no vehicle." Tweaking the damaged line back into alignment, Maru prodded it a few times before determining it serviceable and setting the clamp aside. "What's got you in such a mood, anyway? You're usually one of my easier patients."

Dusty harrumphed, wiggling his empty starboard struts again, very slightly, and glared at an oil-spot on the floor. He looked very young, for a moment - very young and very scared, under the unforgiving glare of the fluorescent lights. "Today was the second time I've watched Blade go down," he mumbled, finally, scuffing the front tire of his port pontoon against the concrete. "And I was just flying around, useless, watching the Smokejumpers save him."

Maru sighed, laid the pontoon down on his workbench, and retrieved the screwdriver he'd thrown. "Y'know, I'm startin' to wonder if there's a single person on this Base who's not getting eaten up with guilt 24/7."

He sincerely doubted Dusty had been as useless as the kid said - for one thing, Blade had come in with a good coating of retardant on him, and Nick hadn't refilled before he'd gone back out.

For another, Dusty had solid instincts and did pretty good under pressure; he was turning into a bit of an adrenaline junkie, which was probably why he'd turned to racing in the first place; crop dusting must have bored him out of his mind. Maru dreaded the trouble he and Nick would get up to when the off season finally rolled around. Tourist money had helped to hire another firefighter at Propwash Junction, which meant that they would have the time to be stupid at their leisure.

"It's not just guilt, it's..."

"Self-recrimination?" Maru offered, when Dusty trailed off. "That's the part of this job that doesn't get easier, kid. But you have to learn what everyone else here learned - you can't do everything. Trust me, most of us figured that out the hard way. There's always gonna be something you can't accomplish, or someone you can't save. Blade and me, we couldn't save Nick. For Cabbie, it was Wally. Windlifter was trying to warn Richter, the Orion, about the wind sheer when it took him down. And we carry that, yeah. But if you let it weigh you down, all it's gonna do is crash you, too."

When that only made Dusty look faintly nauseated, rather than reassured, Maru sighed and rummaged under his workbench until he found the mid-grade he'd stashed there. "Look," he grumbled, popping a straw lid on one can for Dusty before cracking his own, "We've all got different jobs here, and we all have to do different things to do those jobs. And none of us can be anyone else. Dipper came in not too many years after we lost Rick, and she almost worked herself into the ground her first season, trying to make up for a heavy tanker she'd never met. And Dynamite! When she was promoted, I thought she was gonna fall apart entirely, her first season. She couldn't lead the same way the old Lieutenant had, so she went the complete opposite direction and drove everyone crazy, including herself. I had a running bet with Cabbie over who was gonna snap first."

"I don't see what that has to do with -"

Maru pinged the screwdriver neatly off Dusty's canopy again. "My point is, everyone here has their strengths and weaknesses. The trick is making sure they balance out. You're not designed for ground response - you're a _plane_. You drop retardant to make safe places. The Smokejumpers are ground vehicles. They work on the ground to make safe places. The division of labor exists for reasons, one which is called _common sense_."

"I know, but - ow!" Dusty flinched sharply as the wrench clattered to the floor. "That's not fair, Maru!"

"What, lobbing stuff at you when you can't move, or calling you out for being an idiot?"

Dusty opened his mouth, clearly reconsidered whatever he'd been planning on saying, and took a long drink of mid-grade instead.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Maru smirked, taking another swig of his own can before setting it aside and retrieving Dusty's pontoon. "You haven't been doing this long. You'll learn. Just try to do it without crashing again, huh? I don't even wanna think about what the TMST's gonna say to Blade after this one."

* * *

It took them three days to find out.

The fire had been contained the day after Blade's crash, with the help of mutual aid teams from two surrounding counties, but it took a bit longer than that for the lingering effects of the magnetic storm to fade enough to return the full use of their communication equipment.

Once the report was filed, though, it took a grand total of seventeen hours.

The majority of the team was outside, relaxing in the cooler, mid-fall appropriate air after too many days of hot, sooty, summer-like conditions. Windlifter was reading on his deck, Dipper was tending her garden, Cabbie was dozing in the sun outside his hanger, the Smokejumpers clustered beneath his wings like chicks around a hen, and Dusty had meandered over to sit a short distance from Nick and Blade, who were bickering good-naturedly over the merit of a number of stunts they - or occasionally their doubles - had performed on CHoPs, when the loudspeaker snapped to life with an audible crackle.

 _*All Base residents, be advised,*_ \- and wasn't that an interesting change in terminology, Patch? It was usually 'all aircraft' or 'all firefighters,' but Blade caught a glimpse of Wally's shimmer from the corner of his eye and realized exactly why Patch had changed her wording. _*TMST Investigator entering the Base.*_

Maru, out of sheer curiosity, poked his nose out of the workshop at the alert, and promptly burst out laughing at the sight of the vehicle cresting the hill.

"Wha - are you kidding me?!" Dusty exclaimed, staring at the enormous, emergency-green ARFF heading rolling onto the tarmac. "Does the TMST have _any other inspectors?_ "

The pitty rolling at the investigator's wheel shot a look in Dusty's direction that Maru probably could have used to strip paint, and flipped to a new page on his clipboard.

Shooting Dusty a warning look of his own - and ignoring the Smokejumper's explosive and rather giggly outbreak of whispers - Blade rolled forward to greet the investigator, uncomfortably aware of his still- empty rotor hub. Nick hopped out alongside him, and Blade could just about feel his partner's wary frown.

"Mister Ryker. I wish I could say it was nice to see you again."

"Chief Ranger. This does make for a concerning frequency of visits," Ryker acknowledged, his eyes tracking over Blade's rotor hub without lingering. Blade found himself more grateful for the consideration than he'd expected. He was, at the very least, in better shape than the last time he'd had to face this guy down - being grounded, he hadn't really had much choice but to sit around and let Maru hammer his damage out. Even his paint was pristine, a distinct improvement over the last time.

Ryker's eyes slipped off Blade, flickering an evaluating glance over Nick, and Blade had the unexpected entertainment of seeing the investigator's eyes widen sharply, a stunned expression flickering over his face for a split-second. "Lopez?"

Nick's eyebrows shot up. "Present...?"

"Nicholas Llewellyn Lopez?"

Dusty's chortle of 'Lou Ellen?!' was ignored, but the chattering Smokejumpers fell silent at Maru's sharp intake of breath, and Blade mentally ran through a good portion of his not-appropriate-for-television vocabulary.

They hadn't planned for this. It was stupid and thoughtless, but nobody had said, or even thought, _'What are we going to do when Nick is recognized?'_

To be fair, they had been busy. But the past week of busy meant that right now, they were flying blind.

Nick hopped back a few inches, his expression closing off as he retreated, and Dusty and Windlifter rolled forwards, flanking him without hesitation. Whether they were hoping to keep Nick calm or ward Ryker off, Blade didn't know - not that he thought either plan of action would have an especially high chance of success.

"To the best of my knowledge, Mister Ryker, I'm not part of your investigation," Nick said, and his enunciation had taken on the stiff, precise clarity that he only ever achieved when he was resisting the urge to smack somebody.

Blade edged forward a few inches, just to be cautious. Not that Nick would even be able to put a dent on an ARFF tipping the scales at twice Cabbie's weight, but it was probably better not to give him the opportunity.

Ryker, unfortunately, was a stubborn son of a slagheap; a great quality for an investigator, sure, but not when he was dead-set on getting an explanation for a decades-dead helicopter turning up in the middle of an investigation, and he rolled around Blade to square himself to Nick without blinking.

"You are Nicholas Lopez, the actor, are you not?"

Ryker's aide shot Blade a somewhat bewildered look, which Blade returned. Nick stiffened his rotors slightly, his eyes darkening

"You're a little young to remember him, buddy. Loopin' Lopez died in eighty-three." Nick hopped backwards another few inches, the retreat strange enough in itself, particularly given how tense his rotors were.

Ryker pinned him with a gaze that would have frozen a lesser vehicle in its tracks, but didn't push forward. "I remember him quite clearly. My father was the lead investigator of his crash."

Nick managed to pause mid-hop, his skids hitting the ground with a clunk that made Blade and Maru both wince, and glowered. "Sure. Right. Next you're gonna tell me that you were that little grey tire-biter that was touring the set with his daddy a few weeks before I went down."

The silence that followed spoke volumes.

An explosion of profanity drifted out of the garage - Maru had a vocabulary that could shock a cargo ship - and Nick stared up at Ryker with an expression that might otherwise have suggested the percussive application of a two-by-four. "Are you slagging _kidding me?!_ "

Blade shut his eyes, abruptly able to sympathize with the migraines Cabbie had been suffering from all week. He remembered quite clearly- the big blue-and-grey Oshkosh ARFF, who had been sent in as the supervisor of the safety crew when the script called for a plane to crash-land on the freeway. He'd brought his son along, so damn delighted to show the kid the workings of a TV show, and Nick - who was amazingly good with children even on a bad day, which that hadn't been - had been the one to give the kid the grand tour.

Although Blade's memories of the days and weeks following Nick's crash were hazy at best - the coping mechanisms he'd been drinking at the time tended to do that - he did have the vague impression of that same Oshkosh being one of the investigators of record.

"Chrysler, you grew," Nick muttered.

"Amazingly, things like that happen in thirty-one years!" Maru bellowed from the garage, and Nick sighed heavily, his rotor blades finally losing their stiff tension as he sagged back on his skids

"I did," Ryker acknowledged, studying Nick closely. "I was not aware that your core was salvageable for a rebuild, Mister Lopez."

Blade winced, Dusty made a noise somewhere between a choke and a squeak, Maru muttered off a string of curses that included terms Blade hadn't heard in years, and Cabbie snorted with laughter.

A core rebuild, aside from being a misnomer, was a very rare, very expensive, and very risky procedure, that involved transferring the core of a vehicle whose body had been otherwise destroyed into a donor body. The results were hit or miss, with an average that would have gotten most batters thrown off the plate. Full recovery, including complete transfer of memories and personality, accounted for somewhere around twenty percent of the results. Partial successes, in which the salvaged core transferred a recognizable but changed personality and half or more of the memories, were somewhere around another thirty percent.

The remaining fifty percent were a pretty even split between dying on the table and waking up screamingly insane. As such, the procedure was not looked upon particularly favorably, although it had been a bit more common back in the eighties.

If there had been any chance of salvaging Nick's core, Blade would have gladly opted for that slim chance and prayed with everything he had to be one of the lucky ones who got his loved one back.

Nick shot a look at Windlifter, who twitched his rotors uncomfortably, but didn't respond. Dusty was still making a vaguely clogged-filter noise that was probably somewhere between horror and laughter, and Cabbie was chortling away, gallows humor in full... swing.

Mentally slapping himself for the pun, Blade turned his attention back to the current issue. Nick had perked up slightly, stretching up on his struts, tipped ever-so-slightly, as though he was listening to something. Blade could almost catch it, a low murmur at the edges of his hearing, but it fell silent again before he could make sense of the words.

Then Windlifter shifted slightly, his expression going from studiously blank to thoughtfully amused, and Blade realized exactly what they were planning.

With the effects of the magnetic storms fading, the Base's ghosts were spending less time visible - 'power-save mode,' Nick had called it - but, through some metaphysical nonsense that Blade couldn't begin to grasp, the simple fact that the team now knew of, and believed in, the ghosts somehow worked to make them stronger than they had been before the storm.

"Actually," Nick remarked, abruptly cheerful as he wiggled away from Dusty and Windlifter and bounded past Ryker, towards a clear stretch of taxiway, "I was completely destroyed in the crash. No chance of a rebuild - trust me, Maru and Blade would have tried."

Frowning deeply enough to pull his headlights out of alignment, Ryker carefully turned to face Nick again. "In which case, how are you here?"

"Well, after I spent thirty-one years followin' my partner around as a ghost -" Nick put perhaps a bit too much leer on the word 'partner' - "I guess the fates decided to be kind."

Ryker scowled, squaring himself to Nick again with an irritated hiss of air brakes. "Mister Lopez, there is no such thing as -"

Precisely on cue, two enormous forms shimmered into view behind Nick - Wally, grinning ear to ear, and Richter, whose unimpressed face was nearly a match for Ryker's own. Daisy, the purple Cessna, peered nervously out at the group from under Wally's wing, and a transparent Caterpillar track loader drifted slowly to Nick's side.

"Ghosts?" Nick asked, six kinds of cheerful smugness. "You wanna bet on that?"

* * *

It took less time that Blade expected for Ryker to compose himself, considering they'd just turned the poor guy's world upside-down and inside-out in about two minutes flat. (His aide, oddly enough, didn't seem even remotely surprised by the revelation that ghosts existed, but perhaps it hadn't been a revelation to him.)

They'd rattled the big ARFF enough that he accepted a drink from them, although it was a plain can of oil, not the mid-grade that Maru had rather cheekily offered first. Nick had snagged that can when Ryker declined it, and Blade had promptly taken it from him.

"I'm grounded," Blade pointed out, smirking in the face of Nick's startled glare. "And I am off-duty. You are neither."

"The Pits I'm not off-duty, I spent ten hours being Air Boss for sixteen different aircraft!"

"That was two days ago," Dusty pointed out. "And I spent those same ten hours playing message relay between the air teams!"

"S'what you get for bein' fast, kid," Nick grinned back.

Blade saw the warning gleam starting in both Dusty and Maru's eyes, and cleared his throat sharply, managing to bite back his smirk at the instant silence. The last thing he needed was a battle of 'fast' jokes, particularly in front of the TMST. Or the Smokejumpers. One of those groups might let him live the ensuing embarrassment down, but it would not be the team he worked with on a daily basis. "I believe Investigator Ryker still has questions for us."

* * *

The interview was surprisingly quick and painless; Ryker still had most of the paperwork from the last time he'd been out, and Blade now had a handle on both his interview questions and style. Drip answered the questions addressed to him without too much fuss or confusion, Dynamite and Nick added their testimonies, and that was pretty much that.

Except for one or two details...

"Mister Lopez -" there was the barest hesitation in Ryker's voice as he spoke Nick's name, but he pushed past it and carried on. "You stated that Smokejumper Drip's condition was communicated to you, but it has also been made clear that your radios were non-functional due to magnetic interference. How was this communication achieved?"

Cabbie, who'd been sitting on the fringes of the group, gave a suspiciously amused cough, his eyes going to the pale shimmer hovering in the air near him, while Windlifter and Blade exchanged glances and Dipper giggled nervously.

"We've developed a relatively unique emergency communication system over the last week," Nick offered, and winced slightly when Ryker raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

"An emergency communication system that continues to function despite a radio blackout would be of extreme value to other agencies, Mister Lopez. The details of it would be appreciated."

"Sure it would, but how many of your other agencies believe in ghosts?"

Ryker's aide, who had been taking careful notes of the conversation, clicked his pen shut, tore off the page he'd been writing on, crumpled it up, and lobbed it twenty feet across the tarmac and squarely into the recycling bin.

Ryker looked like he might have been reconsidering the can of mid-grade. "You were using ghosts as a communication system? How?"

Wally's shimmer disappeared from Cabbie's side with a flicker, and Blade scooted a few feet sideways, leaving room for him to appear between himself and Windlifter. The C-119 did just that a second later, grinning fit to split his face.

"Teleportation!" the big plane announced, sounding almost manically gleeful.

Ryker jolted backwards a foot, shot the entire team a deeply incredulous glance, and closed his eyes in resignation.

"Writin' this one up is gonna be the Pits, ain't it?" Maru chuckled, rolling by with another can of mid-grade, and Ryker nodded, wordlessly.

"We do appreciate your understanding, Investigator Ryker," Blade offered. "Adapting to this situation has been a very steep learning curve, for all of us. If there's anything we can do to help you -"

The ARFF shifted one tire enough to cut Blade off. "There is one thing you can do, yes. You can explain exactly how Mister Lopez came back to life."

Of course. "As much as I would like to, at the moment, we don't know how Nick was brought back."

Windlifter, perfectly visible to Blade on the other side of Wally's transparent form, gave his rotors a sharp twitch of disagreement, the movement enough to catch Blade's eye.

"Windlifter?" Nick hopped forward, his expression one of eager worry. "You've got something?"

Very slowly, the big Sikorsky nodded. "I think I may have an answer."

[END CHAPTER 11]

* * *

Notes:

1 - Cores - mentioned previously, including the top notes of Chapter 9, these are the physical embodiment of a vehicle's soul, separate from both brain and engine. Similar to the Spark of a Transformer, these are my headcanon for the life force of the vehicles in the Cars world.

2 - I think Windlifter is, canonically, some kind of ninja. Think about it - when Dusty first lands at PPAA, Windy is up on his deck, lifting logs. We pan past Dipper, Maru, and Cabbie, and then Drip goes sailing overhead and nearly takes off Dusty's canopy. Windlifter's deck is visible behind Dusty just after Drip lands, and _Windlifter isn't there._ He just randomly rolls up next to Dynamite and Blackout while Dipper is doing her 'OMG DUSTY CROPHOPPER!' bit. Really, watch it again if you don't believe me, it's on YouTube. There doesn't appear to be any kind of ramp or access hatch to the deck, meaning he has to fly on and off of it. Which means that a ten-ton, seventy foot long, two-engine helicopter can unhook from the logs and fly off his deck, silently, in under twenty seconds, without being noticed. He also pulled the same trick in this chapter, and I failed to notice until my third read-through. Srsly. Ninja. _Canonical fricking ninja._

3 - Llewellyn - Ponch's full name is Francis Llewellyn Poncherello - Francis to his mother, Frank to his Sergeant, Ponch to essentially everyone else. It is more or less pronounced 'Lou Ellen.' Somewhat confusingly, given that Erik - and as far as I am aware, Ponch - is of Puerto Rican descent, the name is Welsh in origin, and means 'Lion.'

4 - Via Wikipedia, the curb weight for an Oshkosh Striker 3000, Ryker's model, is a staggering 87,000lbs in a 40' long, 12' tall body. A spec C-119, by contrast, at 86.5' long and 26.5' tall, weighs only (ha!) 40,000lbs, although Cabbie probably runs to the heavy side of that.

5 - Ryker is listed in the Planes Wiki as being 'a 17 year TMST veteran,' which would have him born in '79 at the absolute latest, and probably closer to '75. CHiPs, and presumably CHoPs, aired '77-'83. Funnily enough, it also states that Ryker is the ARFF you can spot in the crowd following Dusty's win at the end of the first Planes movie. While I had seen the ARFF in question, I had at the time assumed it was another TMST agent with the same paint job, as he's cheerfully bouncing up and down, celebrating Dusty's victory, which doesn't quite tally with his presentation in Planes F&R.

6 - The Oshkosh Corporation has been producing ARFFs since 1953.

7 - Gallows humor in full swing - Honestly, that pun was a complete accident. Blade wasn't the only one slapping himself.

8 - Chapter title from Il Divo's 'Rejoice', which suits Nick and Blade quite nicely, as well as being in the spirit of the approaching holidays. (NB: This chapter was originally posted mid-December.)


	12. Reclaim

Here it is, the final chapter of All Hallowed! If you've enjoyed Nick and Blade's Insane Adventure, feel free to join the continuations thereof in upcoming chapters of _Another Story Altogether_ and the soon-to-be-posted-here _Hallowed 'verse Director's Cut._

A friendly reminder that any Native American rituals suggested/described herein are A) To the best of my knowledge, complete and utter BS, B) Not intended to insult, offend, belittle, or be in any way negatively intended towards people of Native American descent, or, frankly, anybody at all. Also, I should not need to put this but will anyway, C) _Not to be tried at home._

* * *

 **ALL HALLOWED  
CHAPTER TWELVE**  
RECLAIM

 _"I think I may have an answer."_

"What? Since when?! You been holdin' out on me, man?"

Windlifter gave his rotors a very, very slight flick in response, and Blade stifled a snort. He'd never actually seen the big Sikorsky make that gesture out of annoyance before.

"An hour ago," Windlifter answered succinctly, ignoring Blade's amusement. An hour ago would have been right about when Ryker rolled in, which at least explained why he hadn't said something at the time.

Nick realized it, too, if the embarrassed droop of his rotor blades was any indication. "Sorry, Winds. I shouldn't've snapped."

The big Sikorsky only hummed in response, waiting patiently as the rest of the team edged forward, clustering around him. The Smokejumpers rolled up at Ryker's sides without hesitation, ignoring the ARFF's surprise.

"The volumes that Victoria sent me did contain the answer we sought," Windlifter began. "The ritual that returns one who has remained to their physical form. It is a form of magic that was ancient before my people had found their name, and had long since fallen into legend and -"

Blade cleared his throat, sharply.

Windlifter shot him a narrow-eyed glance and flicked his rotors again, much less subtly, but cleared his throat and began again, his voice slipping back to his clipped working tones rather than his storyteller's cadence.

"The ritual is an ancient one, requiring two key aspects; willing sacrifices to free the spirit from the bonds of death, and an anchor to draw the spirit home. The sacrifices must offer themselves to each of the elements - earth, fire, wind, and water. The anchor must be one of familiarity and love. There are many records of it being attempted, and few mentions that it was ever effective." Windlifter paused, possibly waiting for questions, but his audience waited in attentive silence.

Nodding very slightly, he continued. "However, those few mentions all suggest times at which the veil between the physical and spirit worlds were particularly thin. Some mentioned visible aurora consistent with magnetic storms, and others seemed to occur at times near what would now be Halloween."

"Dia de los Muertos," Nick murmured, and Windlifter nodded towards him.

"Yes. Also Samhain, the Day of All Souls, and many similar celebrations," Windlifter added. "Many cultures throughout the world have sensed and celebrated the thinning of the veil and the visitation of the spirits. But very few have been fortunate enough to have their loved one returned to life, even attempting it."

"And you've managed it by accident," Ryker muttered, and raised his eyebrows when most of the team turned astonished and uncomprehending looks his way.

"What do you mean, we managed it by accident? We didn't do anything!" Dusty objected, confusion, rather than denial, coloring his voice.

"Mister Crophopper, if the terms of the ritual are as Lieutenant Windlifter has explained, you and Chief Ranger are those primarily responsible for returning Mister Lopez to life," Ryker snapped. "Those terms were willing sacrifices to the four elements. Chief Ranger willingly risked his life defending you from the fire, and nearly died crashing into earth. You yourself were nearly killed taking on water and making an air drop. Fire. Earth. Water. Air. Four elements."

Dusty's stunned, wide-eyed expression would have been utterly hilarious, if Blade wasn't quite sure he was wearing its match. Windlifter, by contrast, looked immensely pleased and a bit smug; whether by the revelation that they had accomplished an ancient sacrificial ritual both without casualties and completely by accident, or because it had been Ryker that explain it, was impossible to guess.

"Well, that explains the sacrifices," Nick began, sounding nearly as rattled as Blade felt. "But the anchor?"

"Simple," Maru chimed in. "Blade -"

But Blade was already shaking his head. "No. My love for Nick never diminished, and I was thinking of him when I went down, but I think the anchor was provided by the Smokejumpers." Smiling to himself, he let their shouts of disbelief die down before continuing. "Dynamite said it herself, Halloween night. That watching CHoPs so much made Nick feel like an old friend."

Dynamite's eyes widened. "That's right," she whispered, barely more than a breath. "I said that he felt alive to us..."

"Of course, the fanfiction never hurt, either," Nick added slyly, his grin taking on a wicked edge when Dipper gave a horrified squeak and Pinecone moaned with embarrassment, hiding her face behind her rake.

Nick's smile gentled, though, as he surveyed the team surrounding him. "I think it was all of you guys, in the end. You loved me or knew me or believed in me. And you kept Blade safe, gave me something to come back to. I owe all of you my life."

"Yeah," Drip piped up, "but we all owe you ours!"

Nick tipped his head slightly, regarding the young Smokejumper in confusion. "How d'you figure?"

"THAT'S EASY!" Avalanche grinned. "BLADE DECIDED TO BECOME A FIREFIGHTER BECAUSE OF YOU!"

"And Blade's saved all of our lives at one point or another!" added Dipper, twirling her props for emphasis.

"More than once, for some of us," Dynamite added, to enthusiastic nods from her team and a low hum of agreement from Cabbie.

"And it's come full circle," the warplane added. "You saved Blade by taking over and directing the team when he was injured." A wave of his starboard flap towards Wally, once again over his wing, showed that he meant more than just the living members of the team. "And," he added quietly, "some of us owe you a lot more than others."

Nick accepted the veiled thanks with a smile and a nod. "No charge, big guy. That's what friends are for."

"Indeed," added Ryker, his tone desert-dry, and several members of the team jumped, startled. It took some doing to forget the presence of a vehicle his size, but in their distraction, they'd managed.

"I am satisfied that I have the details necessary to conclude this investigation," the ARFF said levelly. "You will receive a copy my report within three..." Ryker paused, clearly considering, then shook his head slightly. "Within one business week."

Neither Nick nor Maru bothered to hide their snickers, and Blade found he couldn't quite mask his grin. He did not envy the investigator for the verbal juggling ahead of him.

"Good luck with that one, Nicky," Nick chuckled, earning himself several odd looks from the rest of the team. "What?" Nick grinned, his expression one of affected innocence as he grinned at Blade and Maru. "Y'don't remember the kid? He only spent eight hours on set, talking about how cool it was to see the filming, how awesome it was that his dad brought him, how excited he was to meet me, _because we had the same name?"_

Even Ryker's aide stopped and turned a questioning glance on the investigator at that, and the ARFF glared around at them all for a long moment before blowing a sharp exhale through his vents. "It appears I never properly introduced myself. _Nicholas_ Ryker of the Transportation Management Safety Team." The words 'at your service' were conspicuously absent, but Blade found himself smiling - almost grinning - anyway.

"It's a pleasure to meet you again, Nicholas," Blade offered, and the investigator's deep scowl softened into an expression of weary resignation.

"Indeed. I hope that I shall not see you again soon in a professional manner, Chief Ranger."

It was, of course, Nick who took the verbal bait, laughing as he did it. "And what about a non-professional manner, Nicky?"

Ryker sighed deeply, closing his eyes for a moment. "I will... entertain the possibility, Mister Lopez, if it is open to me."

"Wide as the sky, Nicky. It's open wide as the sky."

* * *

When Ryker's report did arrive - four days later, which meant he'd accomplished his verbal juggling in amazingly good time - Blade frowned slightly at the thickness of the envelope. The report he'd received from July had only been half this size, and that had been on both his and Dusty's accidents, _and_ the findings that had gotten Spinner removed from his post - why was this one so much bigger?

A soft thunk behind him alerted him to Nick's presence, even before the other chopper bumped up against him, rubbing comfortably along his side. "Watcha got, Blaze?"

Leaning back against Nick's comforting weight, Blade twitched his nose enough to shift the thick envelope a few inches across his desk, closer to Nick. "Ryker's report came in."

"Huh. Kid does fast work." Frowning a little, Nick tilted his head, scrutinizing the envelope. "Looks awfully big, doesn't it?"

"Mmhm. I had the same thought."

"Any ideas?"

"None that I find particularly comforting," Blade sighed, but leaned forward to grab the tear-strip in his teeth. The envelope opened easily enough, spilling out two different sheaves of paper - the top one was immediately identifiable as one of Ryker's reports, identical in layout to the ones tucked in Blade's filing cabinet.

The second one had a large, biliously orange Post-It Note stuck to the front of it that effectively obscured half the page - but not the large, bolded title of the documents.

 **IDENTITY RECLAMATION - POST CORE REBUILD**

"What the -" Confusion creasing his forehead, Nick nudged the papers around until the writing on the Post-It became readable. The top portion of it was written in small, neat, practiced script, undoubtedly that of Ryker's aide, and read:

 _Lopez -_

 _Many of the core rebuilds performed during the 1980s_  
 _were never properly recorded. No penalty is accorded to_  
 _those who were not filed; however, your standing as a legal_  
 _citizen is dependent on reclaiming your identity. All of the_  
 _necessary paperwork to file for your reclamation is included._

Below that, in a larger and less tidy scrawl, had been added:

 _If you file by the end of the week, my contact within the  
department will have your identity restored by Chrysmas._

 _\- Nicholas_

There was a second of stunned silence, before Nick let out an earsplitting whoop, pressed a smacking kiss to the side of Blade's nose, and hopped back with a second gleeful shout. "Nicky, ya beauty! Do y'know what this means, Blade?! I can be me! We can be _us!_ "

"As opposed to what we are now?" Blade asked, the end of the question slipping out on a chuckle. Nick's enthusiasm was as contagious as ever, and Blade could hear confused murmurs from his team as Nick's shouts echoed off the other hangers.

"Wha - no, never opposed, _mi amado_. An expansion of. I wanna -" Nick hesitated sharply, almost biting his tongue, and give his head a miniscule shake, before hopping forward again and to nuzzle against Blade's side. "I want us to be everything we never could be, Blaze. I want us to be _us_ , for real and forever."

"Forever, huh?" Blade echoed, backing up to nip playfully at his partner's bottom lip. "Thirty-six years so far, Nick - that's a damned good start."

"Maybe, Blaze, maybe. But you know I never settled for just good - it's only the best for me." Pressing a quick kiss to Blade's mouth, Nick drew back, grinning. "That's why I had to have you."

"Charmer."

"Don't you know it. C'mon, help me out with these forms. I've got big plans, Blaze, and I need to be a real boy to make 'em happen."

"Sure thing, Pinocchio. Just point your nose in the other direction when I ask you what those plans are. You always were a terrible liar."

"Ain't my _nose_ that you make grow, baby," Nick countered, his voice a sensual purr, and there was a resounding crash from outside the door as the eavesdropping Smokejumpers collided while attempting to flee from the horror of their Chief having a sex life.

Laughing, Blade leaned forward and claimed another kiss.

[END]

* * *

Notes:

Aaaaand that is that! For the details and implementation of Nick's grand plan, check out the prequel/sequel series Another Story Altogether, and keep an eye for side stories in the same 'verse.


End file.
